by Two years have passed in San Francisco. Full of memories and full of wonderful encounters! The city moves fast and you never get bored. I tried so many different things and discovered new hobbies. A true life changing experience.
It all started with this idea of doing an internship with my school, but the partnership they had in place with an American school got cancelled and they never helped me. Therefore, I applied alone and after only a week and a few interviews I was offered an internship! The J1 visa for recent grads is very easily obtained at the US embassy in Paris: only 2 weeks after application.
When you arrive for the first time in a different country, nothing is better than staying in a hostel to meet new people and start the apartment hunting! Craigslist is the way to go in the US if you want to rent a room or a bigger space. I have been pretty lucky and found a place with roommates in the north of San Francisco. Only 30 min of bus from work, and a bus journey with an exceptional view every morning!
Everything has been possible, thanks to Scalr, a SF based startup. They provide a Cloud Management Platform which allows companies to manage different clouds in a single interface. Working in the Bay Area comes with benefits such as getting to see many presentations and meetups about new technologies. Discovering some of the most famous campuses: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft is a must-do for anyone working in tech.
Right after Scalr, I joined Quickpay and I got a fantastic experience with the team there. They trusted me to migrate their on-premises environment to the cloud. With all these experiences Cloud Computing was becoming my new specialty.
San Francisco is very small, and it was a pleasure to walk or bike across the city. Walking and exploring the city will also help you to realise the major inequalities in the bay area. People working in tech are incredibly rich while the rest is not able to afford an apartment or food anymore.
I never got lucky while applying for the H1B visa through the random lottery. Therefore I wasn’t able to stay longer in the US but it brought new adventures instead as I travelled and worked from Canada and Mexico. Life is full of surprises.
