From Neopets to DevOps: How Cathy Song Found Her Path in Programming

Cathy Song's first programming project wasn't a capstone or a side hustle. It was a Neopets profile.

Around age 10, she was copying and pasting CSS snippets and JavaScript widgets to animate her otherwise blank user page — less interested in code than in adding fairies to the background. She had no idea she was writing her first lines of a career. "It's funny looking back at how my interest in programming was initially sparked by this online children's game," she says.

In this story, Song, a Senior DevOps Engineer who joined X-Team in July 2019, traces the unlikely arc from that Neopets page to cloud infrastructure, shares the internship moment that defined her sense of craft and explains the daily rhythms that keep her sharp while working remotely from San Diego.

An Accidental Major, a Lifelong Direction

Song grew up with a strong pull toward math and science, but her high school offered no programming classes. She entered college as a business major. That changed in her first semester, when an introductory programming course stopped her in her tracks.

"I immediately became hooked," she recalls. She kept taking computer science courses, eventually switching her major to electrical and computer engineering — a track that folded together software fundamentals and low-level embedded systems work. The pivot wasn't calculated. It was instinctive.

Her pivot to DevOps, years later, followed the same pattern. For most of her five-plus years as a developer, she focused on writing frontend and backend code. But in her last two roles before X-Team, she started working more heavily with AWS, deploying apps through cloud services and growing interested in the broader architecture beneath the code. "DevOps engineering involves having a vast knowledge of different technologies and tools, deployment strategies, and a more encompassing understanding of software engineering," she says.

Since joining X-Team in mid-2019, she has continued going deeper — learning from colleagues, sharpening her sense of what resilient, scalable systems look like and discovering just how far the DevOps rabbit hole goes.

The Internship That Made It Real

Ask Song for a defining moment and she doesn't reach for a recent production win. She goes back to her first software internship — two programming classes under her belt, a job at a small consulting firm working for the Department of Defense.

The assignment: build a fully functional web app. She came in with minimal JavaScript experience and had never worked with Node.js or React on a real product. "Learning programming in a classroom setting was completely different from working on a real project that would be used by the military," she says. With strong mentorship and a lot of trial and error, she pushed through — implementing frontend components, building a RESTful API and presenting the finished app to stakeholders.

It also reinforced the animating idea she carries today. "There are literally infinite ways to unleash programming and tech to improve the lives of people around us," she says, "so I am driven by this mission to improve society."

The Remote Life She Designed

Song lives in San Diego, and her remote setup reflects the city. A typical morning might start with surfing before a meeting — waves, not the internet — followed by a shower, a video call from her living room and a few hours at Philz Coffee, her preferred spot in the city. She doesn't work in eight straight hours.

"I can set my own schedule and optimize my working hours to produce the best work possible," she says. Breaking the day into chunks keeps her sharper than any open-plan office could.

Physical routine anchors the mental one. Most early mornings she's either surfing or lifting — movement that clears her head before the workday starts. The rest of her system is more analog: notes, to-do lists, a consistent structure that doesn't rely on willpower alone.

The freedom to shape her own environment is part of a larger intention. Song wants her work — and her life — to create what she calls "a ripple effect on society." Being better each day, doing better work and hoping the impulse spreads. "I want to leverage the skills, blessings, and opportunities that I'm given to help others," she says. For her, DevOps is never just infrastructure. It's the technical layer underneath something that matters.

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