CS373 Fall 2020: Daniel Gao

Hi everyone, my name is Daniel and I am a Junior in Computer Science here at UT.

Before College

I was born and spent most of my life in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania before coming to Texas for school. Growing up, I enjoyed playing a variety of instruments, including violin, piano, guitar, saxophone, and drums. I also loved to play soccer and go on hiking trips with my family.

Coming to UT

Since the beginning of high school, I knew I wanted to major in Computer Science. Being the lazy person I am, I loved being able to make the computer do things for me, and being able to solve these complex problems computer scientists face in unique and creative ways was just a bonus.

Knowing that computer science was the path I wanted to take in college, I was naturally drawn to UT both for its competitive CS program as well as its location, as I had heard how fast the tech sector was growing in Austin. Looking back, I am so glad to have made the decision to come down here for school, as I have been able to meet some truly amazing and inspirational people at UT.

Taking SWE

I am very excited to be able to take SWE this semester, as this class checks off my last writing flag requirement for college. Even though I am pretty comfortable with a lot of the topics that concepts that will be covered in this class, I am definitely still looking forward to reinforcing my software engineering skills and maybe learning new techniques and approaches to the engineering process. So far, I am enjoying the class(although the cold calling is terrifying) and am very excited to see what these next couple of months will hold!

Pick of the Week

While studying for system design interviews, I came across this cool video lecture detailing how Dropbox was designed and how they changed and improved the architecture to scale.