Jameson Zaballos

What do you do?

I'm a software engineer at Microsoft working on Azure Serverless Functions. We help you run your code very easily, without having to worry about managing servers or infrastructure. I live in Austin, Texas.

How did you get there?

It took a while. I couldn't finish AP Computer Science in high school. I got a C in my intro computer science course in college, and I never got a software engineering internship. I still managed to graduate with a computer science degree, and moved to Austin, Texas, where I took a job at Dell Technologies as a project manager. Eventually I moved into a software engineering role building Dell's internal platform for data scientists. That helped me re-learn how to be a software engineer. After that, I joined Microsoft.

What advice do you have for current computer science students?

It's ok if you don't get it at first. It's ok to feel like you're moving slower than everyone else. If computer science is something you genuinely enjoy, you will figure it out and forge your path. When I failed my first CS exam, this is exactly what my professor told me, and it stuck with me ever since.

Posted September 20, 2021