About Me

My name is Gilberto Garcia and I’m from Northern California. I started my first job in the tech industry at Uber’s HQ Mailroom. It was here that I realized I wanted to pursue software engineering as a career and started learning how to build software on my own, and under the mentorship of Uber’s Senior Software Engineers. The more I learned, the more passionate I became about this field, and I’m here today to realize the goal I’ve been working towards over the last 3 and a half years, and to continue to grow as a member of an Engineering team. In addition to my engineering skills, I bring unmatched drive and motivation, respect and appreciation for others, and knowledge practically applied as wisdom to the table. In the mid to long-term, I aim to break down the barriers of entry into this industry for people who are underrepresented in tech, and empower communities like mine with the technical knowledge and financial capital that can be gained from this industry. 

My name is Gilberto Garcia, and I was born and raised in Riverbank, CA, and currently live in Oakland, CA. I grew up in California’s Central Valley, in a quiet town called Riverbank, which is next to Modesto, the largest city in Stanislaus County. Growing up in the Modesto area presented many challenges, and I had to navigate an environment where making the wrong decision, even those seemingly benign, could result in devastating, life-long consequences. Growing up in this environment forced me to apply my problem solving and critical thinking skills, very literally, as if my life and freedom depended on them. I am also beyond blessed and grateful to have many positive role models in my life (#1 my Dad), who taught and inspired me to be the man I am today and to pursue the path that I’ve chosen.  

I am where I am today, both figuratively and literally, because of where I grew up. I spent the first five years of my adult life doing everything I could to empower myself to leave Modesto, which is how I became an avid self-learner and first dipped my toes in tech-related fields. It wasn’t until after I got my first job in the tech industry, moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and decided to pursue software engineering, that I realized how lucky I was to have been born there. Of all the places on Earth that I could have been born, I was born less than 100 miles away from the Technology Capitol of the World! 

I was originally accepted into my first choice universites, CSU Long Beach and CSU Los Angeles. However, I decided I wanted to start at Modesto Junior College and later transfer to save money. I majored in Business Administration but debated switching my major to Psychology and took some additional classes in that field. As time went on, I realized college wasn’t really taking me where I wanted to be, and couldn’t really see myself satisfied in a Business Administration career. I’ve always been an enterprising individual, and figured I’d rather take what I’ve learned in school and apply it to running my own business, instead of using my Business Administration degree to get a job working for someone else. As a result, I taught myself a number of different technical skills to implement alongside my business knowledge in order to go into business for myself. I eventually left Modesto Junior College with an A.S in General Studies with an Emphasis in Social Behavioral Science before starting work in the tech industry.

One of my first forays into technology was my business repairing and reselling used mobile phones. I bought a mobile device repair kit and taught myself how to use it. I did device repairs for people, and also bought damaged phones to refurbish and resell. I didn’t pursue this business for very long but gained valuable knowledge and skills in the process, which have helped me in my current job as an IT Technician. One of the most satisfying aspects of this business was seeing the happiness and excitement of my clients once their devices had been restored, while another was seeing everything work as expected after performing challenging technical work.

My next experience with technology, and my first with computer code, was my pursuit of web design. I was interested in the creative aspect of front-end web design, and saw it as a good way to make money on the side, as well as potential full-time career. I learned the basics of HTML and CSS on an amazing website called Team Treehouse, and was introduced to graphic design principles as well. I was a long way from being able to build, test and deploy a web application, but continued to learn the technical aspects of running a website while I became very interested in a new hobby…

I’ve always liked taking pictures and loved learning about cinematography in my high school Film Appreciation class, but I didn’t seriously pursue photography until I took an introductory Black and White Film Photography class for my Art units in college. I fell in love with photography after that and continued taking and editing pictures on my phone until I had enough saved for my first DSLR camera and lens. In addition to pictures, I love creating videos as well.

I learned how to use the Adobe Creative Suite, and also learned more about how computers function, including RAM and CPU usage, solid state memory, and graphics performance. I quickly became very invested, and decided to seriously pursue photography and filmmaking as a business and career. I built a portfolio taking pictures for my friends, and even did a promotional video for the restaurant I worked at. I planned to use my graphic and web design skills, and what I’d learned in school, in conjunction with my photo/video skills to create branding and marketing packages for small business, in addition to stand alone services. At this time, I became more invested in my photography business than my Business Administration degree, although I still intended to finish my transfer credits for my Business Administration degree, with a few units left.

In April 2018, I got a call from my best friend who had moved back to the Bay Area after high school. He’d been working at Uber’s San Francisco Headquarters for a few years, and had been trying to get me to come work with him. I’d told him previously that I wouldn’t be able to while I was in school. This time, however, I realized college wasn’t taking me where I wanted to be, and was seriously pursuing my photography business with an established portfolio of paid work. He told me his job at Uber’s Mailroom was looking for people, and he could help me get the job if I wanted.

I saw an opportunity to advance my photography career further in San Francisco than I could in Modesto, and had already done some work for Bay Area clients. Although I wanted to finish my transfer units, I felt this would be a better opportunity for me professionally, and I’d finally accomplish my goal of moving out of Modesto. I showed up to what was one of the easiest job interviews of my life, for a job that paid more money (with benefits!) than I’d made at any other job. Before this, I’d only worked in food service and at the Amazon warehouse. I was immediately offered the job and left feeling like I’d made it in life. It was honestly one of the best days of my life. I didn’t know it then, but I’d made the right decision to take the job.

I worked at Uber’s Mailroom for exactly a year. One of the best parts about this job was that I got to deliver packages to people’s desks around the office. This allowed me to interact with people representing many different aspects of the business, from design, engineering, data science, and more, at all levels of the reporting structure, including Dara himself. The Design department had some of my favorite people, although everyone I worked around was super cool. While delivering everyone’s packages, I got to talk to them about their jobs, and how their role fits into the larger operations of the business. It was fascinating to see how all of these peoples’ work fits together to deliver a cohesive user experience for Uber’s customers.

As soon as I saw the Software Engineers, I realized I wanted to do their job. Something about having 3 monitors, a laptop, and an iPad on your desk with a bunch of code and terminal windows running just seemed like the coolest thing ever to do for a job. Although I had my photography business, a software engineering job would be a better professional opportunity, and would provide me with more time and money to invest in doing photography as a hobby. Personally, I feel that doing photography for money detracts from the artistic aspect of it, and I’d rather have the freedom to invest in my own artistic work than spend my creative energy doing work for someone else.

Another benefit of my mailroom job was learning where all of the O’Reily technical books were stashed around the office. I’d read some of these on my downtime and make note of the technologies and topics I was interested in, and bought some of these books for myself. I also was provided great guidance and resources from my engineer friends and mentors that I delivered packages to. I started an online Python course on Treehouse, where I first learned Web Design. I chose Python as my first language, because the Mailroom team had recently distributed “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” to all of Uber’s non-tech employees. I figured if it was good for Uber and easy enough for their non-tech employees, it would be a good first choice. Once I began learning, I knew this was what I wanted to do. My dad always told me I should be a programmer, but I always perceived writing code to be like writing an English paper - lame and boring. Man, was I wrong! Sorry Pops!

After learning the basics of programming and computer science, I was recommended “The Go Programming Language” and “Designing Data Intensive Applications” by two of my mentors. At this time, I’d also started my new position at Uber’s HQ as an IT Technician. Golang has since become my favorite programming language and is what I use for most of my personal work. Additionally, my IT role offered me the opportunity to learn AWS Cloud and get AWS certified, and I still intend to earn the AWS Certified Developer and Solutions Architect (Associate and Professional) certifications. While at Uber, I was also introduced to the Serverless programming model.

One of the highlights of my time on Uber’s IT Service Desk team is the appointment scheduling application that I built for our team. In Q1 2021, we implemented a new appointment-based process for Service Desk interactions alongside our RTO following the Covid-19 shutdown. Previously, employees would walk up to the desk and wait for help, like when you’re trying to order your next beer in a crowded bar. This appointment process was all done manually, and involved many steps such as updating a spreadsheet, emailing the employee to schedule and confirm the appointment, and creating a Google Calendar event. I saw this as an opportunity to help make my local team’s jobs easier and apply my programming skills.

I created a working version of a simple GoogleScript app to automate the email and calendar operations, using a simplified version of the existing spreadsheet as an interface. Once upper management uncovered what I’d done, they really liked the idea and wanted to me to scale it for global use across all of Uber’s offices with an IT Service Desk. I was not expecting this! Building an app for this use case, for this scale on the Google Apps Script platform was definitely a challenge, but I was successfully able to deliver this application using the limited resources available to me.

The production version is much more developed than what I’d originally started with, and contains additional features such as live digital signage, data archival, and an end-user interface to submit appointment requests through an HTML form. I’m proud to say that the current version of the app has been a great success and has greatly improved the efficiency of our teams operations globally. I hope to be able to further develop this application as a Golang-based Serverless application, specifically using the AWS Serverless Application Model. I’ve previously used SAM for my biggest project, the acamoprjct.com website.

I started the acamoprjct.com project to help my friend with his business, ACamoPRJCT, LLC. We started with deploying a simple static website hosted on AWS S3, while I developed the core features, starting with the site’s e-commerce platform. I first learned SAM while studying for the AWS certifications, and saw this as a great opportunity to apply what I’ve learned before taking the certification test. AWS SAM opened my eyes to great potential not seen in traditional architectures. The primary benefits that I saw for my friend's business in Serverless were the managed infrastructure and pay-per-request payment model. Using AWS SAM, the business saves money on operating the website, by reducing the need for application maintenance and oversight with managed infrastructure, and removing the need to pay for continuous server uptime with AWS Lambda functions.

The vision behind this project is to empower small business owners by providing enterprise-scale web applications while reducing dependence on 3rd party services. With the exceptions of the Stripe payment processor, Shippo shipping service for calculating shipping rates and purchasing labels, and the underlying infrastructure, the application does not rely on any 3rd party services, such as Shopify, and the business owner doesn’t pay any recurring fees. The AWS Free Tier is generous enough to where most small businesses will rarely exceed the free tier limits for most, if not all, of the AWS services used in my Serverless implementation. Even then, the cost incurred will be significantly less than what it would cost using services such as Heroku and EC2 at similar scale.

New features of this web app will be deployed in stages. As of 2/22/2022, the development work for the e-commerce platform is finished, and we’re currently working on deploying this stage of the application. One thing I’ve learned through this experience is that there’s a lot more to deploying business applications than the Software Development Life Cycle. This involves many other aspects of the business, such as legal implications, business operations, and IT administration. Thankfully, my friend and I have great knowledge and resources between the both of us, and these challenges have enabled us to grow professionally outside of our full-time jobs. Stay tuned at acamoprjct.com to join us on this journey and see how this business grows!

Now that you’ve read my background and how I got this point, you’re probably wondering, “What’s next?”. Will I find a new interest and decide I no longer want to do software engineering? Well, I have no plans to quit pursuing software engineering any time soon. I’m currently seeking my first full-time job as a Software Engineer. Within 5 years, I hope to advance to a Senior Software Engineer role. I would also like to learn Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. I ultimately hope to be in a position where I can mentor and empower others, especially those with backgrounds like mine, to pursue and and be successful in software engineering or other roles in the tech industry.

I see great power in this field, because you don’t need to go to college to do this job or other jobs in tech. However, it’s really hard to get a job like this without a degree. It is imperative to me to work towards changing that paradigm for others and unlock opportunity for anyone who’s willing to commit the time and effort to learn and refine these skills. Technology is the future, and the future belongs to those who prepare for it today.

- Gilberto