Hello from Taiwan 👋🏼 As many of you would have known that I was planning to start my new job earlier this year in January/February 2020 as a Test Engineer at Google, but as the COVID19 outbreak happened, we had to delay my starting date many multiple times, and I started working remotely back in April 2020 (OMG, its been over 6 months already). 

Recently as my home state of Victoria in Australia got out of our second wave of COVID19, I decided it was probably a good time to relocate, so I worked alongside Google's internal HR teams to help me relocate to Taiwan.

My exemption to leave Australia was granted by the Australian Border Force (Department of Home Affairs) within two hours, I applied with my offer letter from Google Taiwan and an email explaining that my relocation was approved at this time. A big thanks to Kris Howard for her blog post for giving me an idea on how to apply for the exemption

Note: I had a different experience compared to - you can read about her process of her relocating to Germany

Visa was applied normally though I needed a special one which grants me special entry to Taiwan due to COVID19 outbreak

I also needed a negative COVID test, this was done through Healius as I had no symptoms, and I didn't want to visit a GP several times (one for screening - could have done a telehealth, one for the actual swab, and one to pickup the negative certificate). Through Healius, I booked received the request, did the swab at a collections centre and received the negative test result around 8 hours later. - which is really impressive as at the height of Victoria's second wave, turnaround time was 24-96 hours.

The airport was really eerie, check-in was slow and included temperature checks, ABF checks, visa checks, etc. After the check in only 1 line for baggage and body scan security was open, and was relatively slower than usual due to the fact that a lot of the baggage was getting stuck in the x-ray machines, immigration was straightforward and easy with the e-Gates.

The walk afterwards through duty free and the other shops to the gates was really dark, and something that I have never experienced before.

Melbourne Airport COVID-19 Walk to Gate Experience

The seats were empty, I had an entire row of seats to myself!!! 

Thats all from me for now, I will write more in a seperate post on my experience with the entry into Taiwan and more about my first few days in quarantine later (hopefully over the weekend or early next week). As always thanks for reading and feel free to DM me over socials to let me know what you think of this post! 

Hello from Taiwan 👋🏼 As many of you would have known that I was planning to start my new job earlier this year in January/February 2020 as a Test Engineer at Google, but as the COVID19 outbreak happened, we had to delay my starting date many multiple times. Recently as my home state of Victoria in Australia got out of our second wave of COVID19, I decided it was probably a good time to relocate, so I worked alongside Google's internal HR teams to help me relocate to Taiwan.

It is absolutely exciting to announce that I have (finally) graduated. While I really wanted to celebrate this amazing event in my life with everyone, this year has really been unprecedented and therefore has been really hard to celebrate with everyone in-person.

From a really young age, I’ve really loved playing with technology and solving problems. For me, especially being impacted by the people around me especially during high school and working alongside people within tech support. Solving and helping fix people’s technological problems and issues have always been something that I’ve enjoyed. Being the eldest in my family, and the first person in my family to complete my Victorian Certificate of Education (with not really the ATAR that I wanted) I didn’t know what to expect when I first got my university offers. I ended up getting two offers (across two different VTAC rounds) first one was from Monash University and the second was a full scholarship offer from Swinburne University of Technology, and I ended up taking the offer of a double degree of Bachelor of Business and Information Technology at Monash. My parents were initially a bit hesitant about myself doing an IT degree, especially at that time the job market for IT professionals was small and it was really hard to find a job (paling in comparison to what it is now), but they also knew that I loved IT so they’ve gradually accepted it.

My time at university has been with a lot of ups and downs, meeting friends across different courses (especially those in the Computer Science and Software Engineering degrees), has impacted my way of thinking and interpreting problems. In my first year, because I was in the Bachelor of Business and Information Technology double degree, I ended up having to travel between the Caulfield and Clayton campuses quite a bit (thanks Amelia for making fun of this), which was really tiring and hectic too (making classes within 1 minute on the occasion). In one of the units, I met two other students who were working on MARIE.js and I wanted to take part too, so that winter holiday we took part of the Winter Research Scholarship Program, and that was my first taste of the research field.

As the year continued, I found that I enjoyed my IT units more than my business units and following discussion with friends, I decided to transfer to the Bachelor of Information Technology degree so that I can explore both Cybersecurity and Computer Science units a lot more. It was during this time, I found it was almost impossible to talk to course advisers, which would help me transfer my course across, after talking to Josh about it, we decided to start a project which would utilise the Unit Guides to help students plan their degree out and that eventually became to be known as MonPlan. MonPlan was like a cool startup that was acquired by Monash within the Innovation Space at eSolutions (central IT department at Monash), and over time we had 14 students join our team. You can read more about my journey and what I’ve learnt at eSolutions here and how we started MonPlan here.

Towards the end of my degree, I wasn’t entirely sure where I wanted to head towards, from my time at eSolutions I’ve experienced many roles such as PM, Full-Stack and Cloud Engineering. I knew I wanted to get into the DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering space to experience ‘more sides of the tech industry’. So I applied at many places to see how far I would go. Never in my mind I would get an interview offer from Google (a place that I’d applied at 7 times before this current attempt), wanting to see how the interview process worked at Google compared to other places and just seeing how far through the process I could go I immediately said yes, and going through 1 phone screen and 4 (on-site) video call interviews, I was given an offer and accepted the offer.

Something that I want to say to future students that are either at university or going through high school exams is: Yes, this year has been tough, humans are resilient, you’ll get through it - all you need to do is follow your dreams and passion, don't give up and everything is reachable. Looking back this past five years, I never knew that I would end up here at Google from when I finished high school.

Without the support of all my classmates, friends, family and awesome managers at Monash, a big shout-out to them and I look forward to catching up with everyone. Special thanks to: Emily Dao, Josh Nelsson-Smith, Saurabh Joshi, Nicholas Whittaker, Linh Truong, Chau Lam, Teresa Finlayson, you guys have really helped a lot throughout my journey both studying and working at Monash.

It is absolutely exciting to announce that I have (finally) graduated. While I really wanted to celebrate this amazing event in my life with everyone, this year has really been unprecedented and therefore it is really hard to celebrate with everyone in-person.

It’s a great honour and privilege to win the 2019 itnews #BenchmarkAwards – Rising Star Category along side Fiona Sparks (Go Victoria!)

Firstly, a big thanks to Josh Nelsson-Smith who started out this project (originally as an Open Source Project) with me – without your initial help and your awesome development and management skills, we wouldn’t have transformed the student experience. Also a thanks to all the other students who worked on this project: Saurabh Joshi, Charles Campton, Robert Koch, David Copley, Harry Ferrier, Ben Clare, Isabel Sprengers, David Lei, Callistus Tan, Katie Ng, Nicholas Whittaker, Mansi Vyas, Hyun Shim, Rebecca Young and Benjamin Yap – you guys are awesome!

Special thanks to Teresa Finlayson, Trevor Woods for really transforming and supporting Student Innovation at Monash University, and thanks to Edwina Harvison for supporting this project through the Student First Program.

Another big thanks goes out to the mentors and managers who without the help of we wouldn’t have made it this far: Linh Truong, Chau Lam and William Harvey.

You can check out the original news article here

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