Char's Life as a BitTorrent Engineer

Key Takeaways

thanks for coming on sjy um that's a great name s is a great name I appreciate it uh yeah so like how how's life how's everything going lately uh life is pretty good actually I'm living in San Francisco which is one of my favorite cities in the world uh New York is a very close second I think actually they might be TI um love my job love my apartment love my pet snake you have a pet snakea have a pet snake what is the pet snake's name uh his name is H which is not a very good name cuz he doesn't actually H that name he's like super chill he's super chill is he a killer stick uh no he eats frozen mice do you have mice in the apartment in the freezer okay what what gu you just start working at vior a recruiter found me online uh almost two and a half years ago when I first started working there um and I don't even think I realized at the time that it was a company um I had used their protocol and their uh client application um you know especially in college to download music and stuff you know po college student um and uh he reached out to me and said they were looking for a front end engineer on a particular project and I just got really really excited I felt like there was definitely something incredibly special about the folks that bit torren it's just like a bunch of quirky nerds who just love technology and love what they do and nobody's really trying to show off or you know be trendy or you know they're in it for the right reasons and I just felt really home that's awesome and it's cool that like you know through this period of like job hunting which is can be really hard um you you found a great position that you seem to love mhm yeah it's great like I I personally like I was looking for jobs and I got rejected by a lot of places and and it hurts a lot I mean do you have any kind of advice for people who are looking for tech jobs like how to like you know deal with rejections and like you know like what what what would what did you do oh well definitely crying in the shower uh that helps a lot uh [Music] seriously though um yeah rejection is definitely going to happen and it hurts and it sucks and there's really nothing you can do about it but usually you'll find after like the initial period of being upset that like it's usually like a you know it's like kind of a blessing in disguise you usually realize that like that was not the right place to be working like either you know it might not have been the right fit or um you know also like if somebody doesn't want you working there like it's not really you know it's like you don't want to date someone who doesn't want to date you I think the key is just to keep powering through and just to not let it get you down too much um cuz eventually you do find the right thing yeah for sure I and I think that's a great analogy that the dating thing you don't want to date someone who doesn't want to dat you what's like your day-to-day life at working at CU it's like a it's an open source protocol right but it's a company that has money right we um and we have multiple products as well it's not just the what we call the bit tent client um so I work on the browser team um I'm a friend an engineer uh although melstrom yeah um although we're actually rebranding this spring as surf oh okay yeah so it's going to be like super sexy oh yes um but uh I yeah I'm a friend an engineer but I occasionally work in the back end so um it's basically uh bit torrent but in the Chromium browser so we've taken the chromium open source code and um we've inserted some of our bit torrent stuff in there and now uh you can basically uh enter a magnet link and uh get a torrent right in your browser that's awesome yeah is it challenging or do you feel like it's something very doable um well both both yeah so which is part of why I love my job um yeah some things are just super easy where it's you know uh doing some kind of uh UI work that's you know just very straightforward and simple um and then sometimes like actually the thing I did today was going in and trying to change um trying to get our torrent settings uh link into the chromium menu like the drop down menu okay and you think that would be really straightforward except the chromium code is not so you basically it's basically like a treasure hunt and you're trying to figure out like where in the code you actually have to change something so it's it's really challenging but it's also really fun and it's doable and it usually feels good when you actually figure out how to do something yeah yeah what what got you into programming in general um so I moved to California to San Francisco in 2005 and I was actually um I was actually an astrophysics major in University W so yeah so um but I didn't want to go into research uh or Academia and so when I moved out here uh I was planning on going back to school for you know mechanical engineering or something a little bit more appli um and while I was doing that uh I had a couple friends who were working on some random project that involved programming um they wanted to make some actually YouTube Vis visualizations oh awes yeah and so uh I I said you know what the hell I'm going to learn how to program and see if I can help out and then I just sort of never looked back I've just been programming every that's awesome and and and one of I think one of the sad things about Sil and valy is there's not enough women in programming yeah it's awesome that you are do you have any like advice that you would give to like girls who who want to learn to code or you know they want to get into the field um yeah definitely um I would definitely say that um first you have to sort of find something that you want to build or make or or just something that you're curious about um doesn't have to be good it doesn't have to be you know useful it can even be something that someone did already that you want to learn about so you just want to rebuild it on your own or something um but it has to be something you're interested in and somewhat passionate about and then you just sort of have to go for it um the other bit of advice would be to um not let anyone tell you can't can't do something um or let anyone put you down and if people do cuz you will definitely encounter people uh who are really insecure themselves and want to put others down and make them feel stupid and make them feel bad um and so just find any way to not let that bother you absolutely cuz that's that's huge I went into an interview once I definitely won't say where okay um and you could tell the guy who came into the room uh didn't know that I was a woman from my resume and he took one look at me and you could just see the look on his face like it was just immediately like it went from like friendly to condescending in like under under a second obviously I can't prove that it was because I'm a woman but right it was definitely because you were yeah wow okay what would be like an ideal you know 10 years from now for for you like for your future or um well hopefully uh hopefully there's a cute guy involved in the picture of career for sure yeah absolutely I'd like to see myself doing something um maybe a little more science or physics oriented I don't know exactly what that would be but um I actually really miss science and so if I can figure out a way to combine the two umam yeah without necessarily needing like a PhD in physics CU I think a lot of you know if I wanted to go work at SpaceX or something I pretty much need a PhD yeah um so yeah trying to find something along those lines where I can still keep up with those interests that's awesome yeah cool well I think yeah thanks for answering all these questions so thanks for coming than for having me this is so fun