Skills:
My first experience with programming was through olympiads and contests. By working hard I earned medals and prizes for my performance. So my most practiced skills are algorithms and data structures. I think it's beautiful how a small but elegant idea or a different point of view can switch a problem status from seemingly impossible to totally doable.

Another thing that I love about programming is code design. I really like when the code is well structured and readable, when everybody can work in sync and how everything fits together like a puzzle. This was reinforced even more by my university because every semester we have a course about SWE from professionals with real world experience. The courses had a lot in common with what I have been taught during my first internship about code health, good practices and design patterns.

One thing I am still constantly learning is data science. I already experimented with data analytics for some personal projects that I have had, mostly data cleaning and feature engineering. The ML part I treated it like a black box where I tried different models, but I know that I need to learn how the algorithms work more in-depth.

I also think that tests are essential in large scale projects, so I learned about unit, integration, smoke and sanity testing. I experimented with scuba testing during my last internship and mutation testing in my personal projects.

Projects:
Some projects I admire and would love to work for are Google Maps, Youtube and Google Ads. I mostly like these because of how they impact so many people (including me, I interact with them daily) and how they keep on improving, but also because of their novel recommendation system. Of course, I am open to any other interesting project.

Regarding the project skills preferences, I worked the most on the backend so this is my most familiar one. My last internship at Google was divided between frontend and backend and I was doing both but with more focus on the latter. But I also enjoyed the frontend part and would be able to learn and work on it given that the project requires it.

Another skill I would love to work with and improve are algorithms and optimization problems. This includes anything from improving performance for a better user experience to improving old systems that are slow or just inefficient to finding novel ways in the context of a better algorithm.

Data science is another skill I am interested in and want to explore further. At the moment I have experience with data collection and cleaning and less with data mining (like graph mining) and analysis. I also want to learn more about big data and working with it using distributed systems.