This is the second in a series of Venmo Developer Spotlights, where you can get insights on what life at Venmo is really like. If these posts tickle your fancy, head over to our job board and join us!

Edmund is a great backend engineer at Venmo. A recent Computer Science graduate from UC Davis, he is very excited to put his years of studying to use at Venmo. His life revolves around food, so expect to catch him trying out a new restaurant or cooking his ol' classic of steak and potatoes at home.

How long have you been with Venmo? What do you work on?

Venmo is my first job out of college, and I've been here a little over four months. I'm a platform engineer on the Money team, which owns the systems that deal with handling, you guessed it, money! This includes things like adding and verifying your bank account and the delicate process of actually moving money around Venmo.

What is your favorite programming language?

I'm a big Python fan these days, but I still have a huge place in my heart for C/C++. I did a lot of CUDA in school and although immensely frustrating, I loved the hours spent in the computer lab trying to squeeze out extra FLOPs out of my GPU.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I probably have an unhealthy obsession with Esports, where I log many more hours watching other people play video games than playing the game myself. While some people spend the weekend marathoning Netflix, I'm spending it marathoning a weekend LoL, CS:GO, or SC2 tournament.

Are you working on any side projects right now?

Now that I finally have my own apartment, I've been spending the past month "pimping" it out to be my little tech-oasis I call home. Organizing the miles of wires throughout the room, setting up the HTPC, automatically downloading the latest TV shows/magazines, wirelessly syncing all of it to my phone/tablet, etc. It's been a ton of fun incrementally building the system out and finding places I can write scripts to automate the process.

What is a fun fact about you that you don’t usually get to talk about?

In the 8th grade, I wrote a 70-page report on Jedi in the Stars Wars universe. This went into detail about their history, bios of influential Jedi, descriptions of force powers, lightsaber designs, and even an interview with a random guy I found on a Star Wars forum. I'm cringing but also laughing hysterically remembering it now.

What advice do you have for aspiring developers?

If you're having trouble finding inspiration to do programming on the side, find things in your life (no matter how small) and optimize it! My very first program was an auto-clicking script that pressed two keys over and over again so that I could get a high score in a Flash game on Neopets.
Looking back, some of the most fun and rewarding coding I've done were just small scripts I made to automate and make my mundane life a little easier. Things like auto-clicking video game bots, Excel macros, and web page parsers were just me thinking "hey, a computer can do this way better!"

Got more questions? Email us at blog@venmo.com!