Hello, I’m Francisco Torres, a software developer from Mexico. I studied electronics engineering, it is not too related to software development, but I learned programming by myself. Yes, I saw some of C progamming in college, but it was not in a deep way and I didn’t have too many programming related subjects.

I was looking for an internship since 2022 winter. In that time I was almost in my last semester of the university, and I had the option to do an internship while I was studying the last semester. I sent my resume to some companies in Linkedin, but no one called me. It wasn’t something bad for me, because I was still studying and I had time to find a job.

The reason why I found the job offer was thanks to the Twitter algorithm. I was just wasting my time on that social media, when it showed me the typical this person follows another person in the timeline. The post was a job offer for a support engineer, not what I was looking for, but it was asking for knowledge in Arduino, and English skills. I sent them an email with my resume asking for an opportunity to do my internship with them. They called me to ask me if I was interested for another job they needed to cover, a webpage translation. I said yes, and they programmed an “interview” with me, but it was more like a conversation where they talked me about the translation job, and the good thing was that I can do it from home.

I started the translation around two weeks later, and I finished it in a month. It was 3 months earlier than they expected, so I asked them if they had a more difficult job for me. They said yes, and they gave me the task to create an embedded web server for a device they were developing called BomberCat.

I didn’t start the web server in that time, because the support team gave another software task to me. It was an embedded version of the Battle Ship game for an event called Maker Faire. They were assembling the hardware for the game while I was programming the software. In those weeks I was working with another developer, he was helping me with the problems I was having and as time went by I felt with we were becoming friends. We finished the game in time, with some bugs, but it was playable. That experience gave me the oportunitty to show them my coding skills, the developer who was helping me told me that he recommended me to the director of the company, really nice from him.

I started working on the web server the next week. I don’t remember exactly how long it took before they opened a job offer in the engineering department. My surprise was that the director of the company sent me a message asking me to apply for the job. I couldn’t believe it, I was so excited, I applied for the job and I got it. I started working as a part time software developer while I was finishing my last semester of the university. It was until I finished my studies that I started working full time on June 1st, 2023.

It’s July 15th when I’m typing this post, and my salary is $9,000 MXN or $530 USD. It is what I receive after taxes, I know it is not too much, but I’m happy because I met my goal of getting a remote software developer job. Money will come later, I’m not worried about that, I’m just enjoying the process of learning and working with a great team.