Tic Tac Amazon

Getting into any department of Amazon can be quite challenging, especially after considering the company's reputation and the competition it has for any role. When the drive happens on campus, the competition would be very limited since all the applicants are the students of the same batch. I'm someone who isn't that great at listening to classes or getting marks. The role offered, requires us to have a good knowledge and understanding of Operating Systems, Computer Networks and Programming.

So, how did I crack it?

Projects, Mission R&D and proper presentation.

Though we have a lot of online tools that would design the resume with appropriate styles, I prefer doing it myself using the word document editor. The centre of attraction on my resume is the projects column cause it is the biggest one with eleven projects on it. No matter whatever role I'm being interviewed for, I've always been asked questions like "How did you find time to do all these projects?" or "You must be really passionate towards development which is why you've done so many projects." That's the moment I get to reply with "There are about eight or nine more on my Github page." Sounds like I have an edge over a lot of people but how did I end up having so many projects?

It was on a Saturday in my first year, first semester when I had a full charge on my HP laptop and the power went off. That was also the time when I started to get off games and moved towards programming. The full charge would last for about four to five hours depending on the usage. Being interested in writing code, I wanted to build my first game, Tic Tac Toe. There were errors, bugs and brute force approaches in the code. However, at the end of the day I was done developing a two player Tic Tac Toe game.

Amused by what code can do, I started digging more. I decided that if I do not spend time developing something like this, my growth would stop. Keeping that in mind, I had enough motivation to build three such console based games by the end of my first year first semester itself. While I was sitting in the classroom all alone during the sports time, our C-Programming faculty walked in. He already knew all the projects I've worked on as of then since he was looking over it. I was suggested to take up a problem that is existing around me and code a solution for it. This way the project would have more weightage since it is actually useful in realtime.

Though my vision was very limited back then and could not actually believe that problems are around me, I still spent time writing code and developing things while gaining a whole lot of practical experience along the way. It wasn't until my second year second semester I came across someone who gave us an insight of the complexity of the realtime problems persisting around us in everyday life.

Mission R&D made me me realise that the projects that I usually take a week to complete could be done in a day. Many aspects of programming and good engineering practices are taught through various examples. With an immense amount of time put into it, I've learnt a hefty amount of things that I wish I knew earlier. Since, Mission R&D is focussed on training us to be proper engineers to be fit for the product development companies and I had a passion to develop products, I could understand the weightage of things learnt there. I always mention Mission R&D since it has played a vast role in changing my life.

During the course of my B.Tech, I've built a few interesting projects that were put to use.

• CodeDuel, our Software Engineering Lab Mini Project, was designed and developed to conduct Code Avadhan at ANITS.
• Automated Certificate Generator & Emailer was used to make and send three hundred Spyry workshop certificates via email.
• Xcode-VS Adapt is intended for the collaboration of developers working on Xcode and Visual Studio
• SetIP, a tool that I use daily, automates the change of static IP address to DHCP when I move between college and home.

During the first round of my AWS interview, I were asked questions on Computer Networks. I had about ten questions in the subject followed by this amazing one. "Have you done any projects that were of significance or put to use?". We had about thirty minutes of discussion regarding that the interviewer commented "Impressive."

In the second round, it didn't start really well. Knowing the interview wasn't going well, I told the interviewer that I was good with CPU Scheduling and File System. That's when the topics shifted for my better. Mission R&D again helped by asking us to implement an actual indexed file system. Not simulating a file system but an actual implementation. The things I've learnt while designing and coding it, helped me answer a lot of in depth questions. They were also interested in taking a look at my Github profile and that was a huge plus. Though I couldn't crack CommVault, I came back home and built a File Backup and Version Restore System that was asked during the second round of the selection process. That counted as well.

The Managerial rounds were done and I came home. The next day when my Dad and I were at the Renault showroom awaiting the delivery of our new car, I had a couple of missed calls and messages from the faculty at my college, congratulating me. That's when I knew I got selected. I still remember the times when I used to see stories of my classmates hanging out at resto cafes and I used to say to myself that someday I'm going to have a much better life but for now I need to code. I used to take my laptop out and clicked my way to Amazon.

Liked it? Take a look at the three hundred plus commits I made to my nineteen repositories on Github. https://github.com/AjayRajNelapudi