Humans of Freetail Hackers
Freetail Hackers is a Student Organization at the University of Texas at Austin. Our mission is to educate individuals about technology and provide an environment for them to learn programming skills through our semiannual hackathons.
An overwhelming number of individuals in the community experience imposter syndrome. In an effort to combat the idea that someone thinks they are a fraud or are not good enough to be in the technology community, we offer up personal testimonies.
You don’t have to found the next billion-dollar technology startup. You just be you!
“You know where I-35 crosses Dean-Keaton? And you know how you are supposed to yield to the bike lane? It was Spring Break, South by Southwest timeframe, and I went through the bike lane expecting the car that was coming down the exit ramp to yield. They hit me. They just ran right into me! I still have the scars from it. I wouldn’t say I feel any different though.
In general, I wish that there weren’t humans driving cars. You don’t need a car in a city. But I don’t know whether AI will improve things or make things worse. Maybe we can have fewer cars on the road. Maybe people will still want their own cars. But I would feel much, much, much safer as a cycler myself when there are not humans driving.”
“I needed logic. I needed science. We were not required to do any math, any science, any of that. I was a film major across campus. Film school is not at all about learning in the classroom. You learn way more on set. It is completely different from Computer Science.
I decided to take the hardest calculus class I could find. I hadn’t done math since junior year of High School. I spent all of winter break studying for it. And still struggled pretty hard. My grandmother was a math professor at Cambridge and she helped me a lot. Calculus ended up being my favorite class that I have ever taken here.
I transferred into Computer Science last year. It’s fun. You work really hard and then you get an answer out of it. But with film, you just keep working on it and it never ends.
Coming into a new thing where everyone seems like they already know everything is really hard mentally. It wasn’t necessarily that the classes were impossibly difficult. It was just that everyone else already knows things and I don’t know anything. That was the difficult part.
I still deal with imposter syndrome. Even now in recruiting season. Every single interview I go into, I’m like ‘I’ve been doing this for a year. I know nothing. Why are these people talking to me?’ It helps to surround yourself with people who constantly remind you how great you are. I found a really cool network of girls here. These badass girls — who go out and get whatever internships they want, do whatever projects they want, get As in class — have been a really great support network.
I don’t know which end of the spectrum I want to be on. There are so many options. With film, your only option is to go out into L.A. and work as hard as you can to get onto a set. Whereas with Computer Science, you can work anywhere. There are so many different fields you can go into. It can be applied to anything.
I always really liked language, and I thought I needed some balance to Computer Science. I didn’t want to go full 180. I wanted some creative stuff as well. It’s not really creative, but it is definitely a softer science for me to have an outlet. Also, Natural Language Processing is really cool.
I decided to become a Linguistics major after joining Computer Science. I’ve compared programming and human languages. The difference is that there is more structure to a computer language. Then you have the muscle memory in your fingers, instead of in your mouth. Other than that, it is a very high curve at the beginning. Once you learn enough, it becomes easier and you become fluent. And it is the same for both.”
“I didn’t sleep that night. I didn’t sleep at all during HackTX. The co-leads and directors put in so much work organizing the event. I didn’t want them to have the added stress of managing things during the event, so I thought I would take up that role.
It was 8:45 AM and all I knew is hoppy hour* is starting in 15 minutes. Michael is asleep. Josh is asleep. Someone needs to take pictures of the cute animals.
I decided I was going to wake up Josh. Every time I went into the rotunda, Josh was in the same spot on the sleeping mattress. He was always in that left-hand corner of it.
I walked into the rotunda. It’s pitch black because everyone is sleeping. I’m like, ‘okay, I just have to get my way over to where Josh is sleeping and wake him up.’ I creeped over to that side and I was like ‘Josh! Josh! Wake up! Hoppy hour is in 15 minutes. We need you to take pictures.’ The figure in the bed takes a while to sit up, and is like, ‘I’m Yuriy.’
‘Wait. Wait. I thought you were Josh!’ I totally didn’t even notice because he was wrapped in blankets. I messed up. The one person I wanted to relax at the hackathon, I woke him up. So I was all, ‘oh no! Yuriy, you’re doing great! Go back to sleep.’
And then, I found Josh right in front of his desk.”
*hoppy hour was an event at HackTX 2017 where hackers got to relax by playing with a variety of animals, including hedgehogs, bunnies, and cheese the bearded dragon.
“I don’t really know any other way of living. This is normal at this point. It’s just how I have always lived.
While there are obviously challenges and frustrations, it’s not something that I let affect how I live my daily life because I know the limitations of it. I know what I can and can’t do. I just work my schedule around that and find things that I can enjoy.
That is kind of how I ended up in Computer Science. I have always enjoyed the idea of building things. Woodwork was never an option. You know, stuff involving construction. Building these large projects was something I wasn’t able to do. But I could build something on a computer. I could make plans for it, I could implement it, and I could see the result at the end.
Which for me was a huge thing. It’s a huge thing to be able to show people my work.”
“When I was growing up, I played in a club team, but not a lot. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I made the decision to focus more on my studies. In a way, that was a correct decision because I ended up coming to a great school with a strong Computer Science program.
I was born and raised in Uruguay. I think my parents did a good job naming me Uriel. I usually go by Uri, so it is pretty easy for people to remember: ‘I’m Uri from Uruguay.’
Soccer is one of the biggest aspects of our culture. We are only three million people. That is like nothing. Uruguay is a tiny fraction of what Texas is in terms of area and number of people.
If you go to Uruguay, you are going to find a lot of people playing soccer on the streets. It runs in our blood streams in a way. When you are three, your parents give you a ball and you start kicking it around.
Last semester, I took Operating Systems at UT. Operating Systems, if you ask anyone that has taken the class or a freshman in Computer Science, it is known to be, if not the hardest class, one of the more harder classes. I came here as a Junior in High School to visit schools. The person that gave me the tour of GDC, that is the Computer Science building, already talked to me about Operating Systems. You invest at lot of time, along the lines of forty hours a week on projects.
Being able to play at the IM fields with the Baby Lions, my team, was a big outlet. I could run around. During the spring semester when I was taking Operating Systems, the Baby Lions won the IM tournament. That was a big accomplishment for me.
Never at any point did I ever feel frightened or scared by the whole atmosphere. I found a lot of friends within Computer Science and within the Jewish community. I found myself home at UT.”
“I’ll be honest, I hated writing — mainly because I didn’t know how writing works. I didn’t have any time at all in order to write. Which looking back, I realize is mainly due to a lack of understanding and experience.
The way I got into writing is through Object Oriented Programming. Professor Downing has you do a weekly blog post. And through the blog post, you talk about: oh, what did you do this past week? What are some problems? What do you plan to do this next week? What are your impressions of the class and such. And through that process, I ended up turning my blog posts from what he wanted to more of a personal outing of my thoughts and ideas.
I had a friend of mine read my blog and she was like ‘hey, you should apply for UT CS’s writing.’ I was like, ‘okay sure.’ I did that and I got in. After writing a lot of posts and researching more into how to write and what are good ways to write, it’s become an output of what is going on in my mind. It’s a really good medium to allow others to hear the ideas and thoughts that you have. Maybe for them to learn.
Maybe it’s something to inspire others. I think that’s what really drives me in writing. There are just so many thoughts that I have in my mind that I really want to share with others. I always live off the fact that when a person messages me, I’m like ‘oh, I didn’t even know that you read it!’ Even just one person saying that, it was worth it.”
“I am 21 years old and I still don’t know my right from my left. I was traversing over this grid-esque data structure. I wrote my whole thing on the board and I was like ‘Yep and I think that’s done!’ The interviewer stopped and looked at it for a second. And then, like, we both realized it at the same time. I was like ‘except for everywhere it says that it was right, I meant left!’
With Operating Systems, it is very easy to break everything. Just get a panic and be like ‘oh okay! I’ve bricked the whole system.’
I feel like people take it for granted. They assume it’s going to work. It’s there. It’s good. It’s taken care of. We can write our other programs and run them. The OS will take care of all the things we expect it to. If something goes wrong, we just restart our computer. You don’t worry about what is wrong with the OS, you just deal with it and move on.
I started getting interested in it through Concurrent Programming, kind of looking at synchronization and how two things running at the same time interact with each other. And then, that got me interested in scheduling. How do you schedule? What runs when? And that just led me into all of Operating Systems. And what really struck me about it, was that it was the last part of the computer that was magic to me and I didn’t want it to be magic anymore.
I am actually only now in the Operating Systems class here at UT. But before that, I looked at UC Berkeley’s online lectures. Look at some of their supplementary materials. Watched the Youtube lectures. And then, just kind of did research on my own.
This summer I had the privilege of working at Apple on their Kernel team. I got to do actual kernel work, look at what a real functional kernel that runs on 10s of thousands of devices looks like. I really, really liked it.
I’m kind of in a unique position because I can talk about what I did. Most other interns are like ‘I did a really cool thing this summer, but I can’t tell you anything about it.’ Nothing really new is happening in Operating Systems. Everything that gets done has been done in academia before — researched, pretty flushed out. My intern project was pretty much just implementing a research paper that has been around for macOS.
We went to Yosemite one weekend. The entire weekend was $65. Including gas for the drivers. Everything. The weekend was amazing. I had never been to Yosemite before. The Grand Canyon was the only other National Park that I have been to. And that was kind of like ‘go to the south rim, look in, it’s so great.’
We saw Half Dome. Pictures of the macOS Operating Systems are named after rocks. And I’m like ‘There it is. There is the picture that is my desktop background in real life.’”
Photography is by Joshua Guenther
Quotes are close to the original interview transcription with only small omissions of filler words, such as “so” or “um.”
