Hello World!

Authors often prefer a step-by-step style to write about programming languages, and they usually start by a "Hello World!" example, so I decided to make it the title of my first blog post in America, because I indeed am experiencing this world for the first time!.

I should start by introducing myself, I am Wael Wajeeh Al-Sallami, a 22 years old guy with a BS in Computer Science, I'm the youngest intern in the Iraq IT interns program and I work with Square, a young company that was started last year by Jack Dorsey, a brilliant entrepreneur who has also started the well known "twitter" four years ago.

Since my arrival here to the US, I've experienced a lot of things, many of which I liked very much and felt lucky to be a part of, the orientation week was wonderful and our supervisor Ms. Meredith Gavilan was nothing but kind and helpful to us, providing guidance to me and the other interns so we can get the best out of the experience, and Ms. Julia De Souza was of great value as well.

After the orientation week, four of us had to leave UC Berkeley's International House where we all used to live together, and there were only three of us left living in the i-House, however I felt lucky to be one of those three due to the wonderful cultural experience one could get from living with people from all around the world.

We - me and Mustafa - started working for Square and it turned out to be one of the best things I have experienced here, it is a small company with a limited number of employees, many of which are now good friends of mine.
Everyone in Square is friendly, in fact so friendly that they invited us to a party before we even started working for them.
I feel so privileged to be a part of this company, to be working with such brilliant minds and great characters, and to be in a "start up" company, which gives me the opportunity to closely observe how new companies evolve, what difficulties they face, and how amazing solutions are constructed, both on the technical and the business scales, which is pretty much what this program is about.

Now After roughly two weeks of working for Square, I feel more confident that this experience is going to be one of the most joyful yet educational ones in my life, and I owe the credit to AED and the US Embassy in Baghdad.

I feel I have said enough for today, but I will be updating this blog on regular bases, so please keep visiting this blog to get the latest updates from me and all the other six interns.

Wael