When you think of a tech company, big names like Meta or Apple always come to mind – but at some point, those giants were once small startups. Meta (Facebook back then) was a few college guys working together in their dorms. Apple started with two college dropouts working out of a garage. With these stories of mind, it’s become a very common dream amongst software engineers to make their own Apple or Meta – and I’m one of them.
From Humble Beginnings
Early on during my first semester at USC, I applied to LavaLab, our premier, student-run startup incubator. After passing the written application and 3 rounds of behavioral/technical interviews, I was finally in. I joined a cohort of 28 founders, which consisted of 14 developers (I was one of them), 7 product managers, and 7 designers.
From the get go, it became obvious that each and every person in LavaLab from the e-board down to the cohort members was so unique in their abilities and stories. It seemed like the ~40 people present at every meeting were absolute gold mines of information who had even more golden hearts and personalities. About 2 weeks in, and after several group events and getaways, we were all assigned to our own groups of 4: 2 devs, 1 product manager (PM), and 1 designer – we were tasked with building our own startup from scratch.
Our group had our idea pretty early on – providing social media analytics to businesses – so we got to work right away. We were all preparing for Demo Day, the day we presented our apps to a panel of 3 brilliant judges and experts in this field. I stayed up for 42 hours straight building the web app, presented it with my team, and when it was all over I slept for another 12 – what a way to end the semester and prepare for finals.
Summer is Here – Now What?
With our PM graduating USC and second dev being occupied with his own projects, my designer and I decided to continue building our product into the summertime ourselves. From our time in LavaLab, we had already found some clients willing to use our services, so the pressure was on to actively improve our product.
What followed was a summer full of working sometimes up to 14 hours a day, forgetting to eat, and quite literally living glued to my desk with 500 tabs open across my laptop and desktop. As time went on, we got more and more clients – which put more and more pressure on our app’s infrastructure. This meant having to essentially rebuild the app from scratch to handle unprecedented levels of growth in web traffic – which is where all the work came in.
I learned how to use so many new languages, APIs, libraries, tools, package managers, debuggers, and so much more. I spent days on end learning how to implement interactive features, manage a database, connect various parts of the app together, build external bots, and everything that my designer (and now PM as well) sent my way to get done. Every line of code I wrote would directly impact something that’s being used by so many people and handle the flow of hundreds of thousands of pieces of data. I was working with technologies and concepts that I was supposed to learn about my junior and senior year as a freshman, essentially accelerating my education 3 years forward. Working in a team, pushing code to a collaborative repository, talking to a growing number of clients, giving feedback, and things that are all hallmarks of working as a full time software engineer became second nature to me – and I haven’t even started sophomore year.
What’s Next?
In a word, I cannot be more grateful for this continuing experience. I’ve loved each and every second of this, from my first LavaLab meeting to writing code for our product during fall move-in. I can truly guarantee that there is no other endeavor I could have taken on that would’ve taught me this much, both about software engineering and myself, in this short of a time frame. My confidence in my own abilities as a developer has gone through the roof – I firmly believe that I could be placed on just about any software team at any company and adapt to their codebase and environment in under 2 weeks. Working 24 hour days back to back on something you’ve built from the ground up instills something in you that nothing else can: an unshakable passion and determination to create good things that benefit all humanity.
