Cohort Stories: Meet Daniel A.
vol. 6, no. 28 — guest post by Daniel Astudillo
I was born in Ecuador, and I immigrated to the United States as a 2-year-old toddler with my parents in February 2002, in pursuit of better economic opportunities and a more promising future. Our first few years in the Bronx were far from comfortable and I witnessed just how hard my parents had to work to reach some stability. Watching my parents overcome the numerous obstacles we faced with grace and gradually build something out of almost nothing helped me understand the true value behind patience, resilience, consistency, and discipline from a very early age. Our community also played an important role during our first years, helping us navigate some of the struggles that accompany the adjustment to a new, incredibly fast-paced lifestyle and making us feel more at ease. Growing up in an environment where Spanish was predominantly utilized in communication brought along an additional set of responsibilities for me at a young age. Extended and immediate family members would often turn to me for assistance with translating important notices and other documents (they still do), a task that naturally became much easier with each additional year of education. Receiving a health insurance letter to translate as a 7-year-old was a very frustrating and humbling experience for me, but one that taught me a bit about how insurance plans work. As the child of first-generation immigrants and a first-generation immigrant myself, I am very proud to take on the “first” prefixes that have been prepended to my titles (i.e., first to graduate from high school in the U.S, first-generation college student, and soon-to-be first-generation college graduate) and I hope to continue acknowledging my parents’ hard work and sacrifices as well as those made by my own community.
The field of technology is currently advancing at an exponential rate, offering nearly limitless opportunities for growth and success to those who strive to push the boundaries of innovation. When I obtained my first computer at the age of 9, I felt a burning desire to understand how Microsoft Paint, Solitaire, and Mahjong worked with a single double-click and why these applications worked perfectly almost every time — the occasional application error only helped to magnify my curiosity. During my first year in high school, I rediscovered my interest in desktop applications and I managed to complete an Introduction to JavaScript course on Codecademy followed by an Introduction to Python on Khan Academy, which sparked my interests in programming and computer science. During Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, I was introduced to MERN (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) web development and I succeeded in developing my first full-stack web application and deploying it on an Amazon EC2 instance. This past week, I successfully managed to deploy my first OSX application locally, which pulls images into a scrolling feed using an API request and allows the user to change their desktop background to any of the displayed images in the feed. More recently, I have been brainstorming on the next project to implement and I intend to keep up this momentum in the following weeks. In the field of technology, curiosity, and willingness to learn are often generously rewarded with advancements that have the potential to bring tremendous value. So, I am really excited to continue growing and exploring with technology.
I feel motivated by my passion for learning about the new technologies and trends that appear daily, the very bright future of the tech industry, the tremendous potential for realizing change through tech, and my vision for a more inclusive, welcoming startup culture.
As a natural first step, I aspire to officially enter the tech industry as a Software Engineer, to have the opportunity to make meaningful connections with other like-minded professionals, gain the necessary amount of professional experience, and be prepared for achieving my long-term goals. Furthermore, I seek to collaborate with other Software Engineers on meaningful projects that bring value to people’s lives, help businesses thrive, and enable change to make our world better; I would not like to see my work discontinued and disregarded after some amount of time. My long-term goals involve launching my own startup, becoming a VC, and starting an incubator intended to support POC startups and promote more inclusion in the startup world. I’m really hoping that I’ll get an opportunity to bring people together, foster an even stronger sense of community, share my knowledge of Computer Science and experience with developing full stack web applications, and achieve personal and professional growth through the Hack.Diversity Software Engineering Fellowship.
