For many years, Ruben Martinez ’15 had longed to go to the Google I/O Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, Calif. “As an aspiring developer and undergraduate computer science major, attending Google I/O has long been the stuff of dreams,” he writes in his blog.

Google I/O is an annual conference when Google shows off such things as it new products and back-end improvements to its operating systems, Martinez explains. Thousands of tech developers attend or tune in online.

Although Martinez couldn’t personally afford the trip, which was held in mid May, he didn’t let that stop him from trying to make “the pilgrimage to attend Google I/O in person.”

Read the rest of Martinez’s story to find out how his being “hyper-connected, where everyone from your childhood friends to the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are but a click away,” helped him, as well as his own tenacity. “Never lose the craving for success, the ambition to fight for what you believe is yours,” he writes. “Even when the world seems to be working against you, don’t lose the courage to keep going.”

(Martinez describes actually being at the conference here, in “Part II.”)