Google site reliability engineer Anna wasn’t one of those
kids who was always playing around with computers. Instead,
it was her love of maths and puzzles that led her to take a CS
subject in high school, where she discovered coding.
“I didn’t know a lot about computers, but I found that coding
was a way of thinking that I was familiar with and good at –
and, most of all, that I enjoyed,” she says. During her
arts/engineering degree at uni, Anna applied for the Google
Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship.
She was a finalist, but couldn’t make it to the finalists’
retreat and didn’t win. Two years later, Google sent her an
email to say they were recruiting, and she landed a software
engineering role. An “engineer at heart”, Anna eventually
became a site reliability engineer in Sydney, responsible for
the effortless performance of products like Google Photos.
“It’s a pretty incredible engineering challenge – to store the
photos of hundreds of millions of people, each of whom may have
tens of thousands of photos, and allow them to be accessed
anytime and anywhere, really fast,” she says. Anna says that
anyone studying maths or science should try coding – not just
because it’s useful but because “you might just fall in love
with it”. If you’re planning to study CS at uni, Anna says to
go where the most challenging problems are, and keep pushing
yourself.
“It’s the tough things that ultimately turn out to be the most
interesting and valuable!