It’s taken quite a while to land where I’m at now. If you told me 10 years ago that I’d be a full time software engineer spending most of my free time reading tutorials on how to write a programming language or how best to manage a complex software project, I wouldn’t have believed you.

 

From early on in high school I was sure I was destined to be a doctor. A neurosurgeon to be specific. Everything in college was based around getting into med school, or so I naively thought. Turns out there’s a bit more to it than just completing the degree.

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So after a few let downs, I found myself in a research lab teaching myself how to do statistical analysis on DNA sequence data in between open heart surgery on pigs for my lab’s project. To be honest I never fully figured out what I was doing with those data-sets but I did learn that I had an interest in programming. I still hadn’t fully given up on my “destiny” of being a doctor so when I started looking for a degree to boost my application, a MSc. in bioinformatics seemed like the perfect fit. “I can kill two birds with one stone”, I thought. “Make my application look more impressive and figure out what this computer science stuff is all about”. After about two intro courses it was pretty clear that I had a knack for coding and a desire to learn it at a much deeper level.

 

I transferred to a full Computer Science degree and never looked backed!

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Fast forward to today, I’ve been a full stack engineer for a little over 6 years now. I work on a small start up team at a company called Helpful Human. Due to how small our team is I’ve had my hand in everything from front end React development, to building web services in Go. I even designed and built our scalable cloud infrastructure on AWS.

 

I’ve managed an oversea developer team, unified our software planning under a standard Agile process and become a team leader in how we approach, develop and deliver software. I certainly don’t know everything but when I’m not working on our company’s app, being a husband to my wonderful wife, or raising our three chaotic children, you can find me reading endless books and blog articles on all kinds of programming, leadership and product management topics.

 

 

Feel free to reach out in the contact form or tweet at me with any thoughts you might have.

 

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