#career

Four years is all it took to go from college-dropout to technical lead and software engineer. From working in an optomertry office studying code during my lunch breaks to leading transformations of systems that served tens of thousands of users on a daily basis. Here are all of the lessons, takeaways, pros and cons of moving fast in my tech career.

In episode #193 of the freeCodeCamp podcast, I joined Quincy Larson to tell my journey in tech: from a career-ending knee injury in my first college semester, to working the front desk of an optometry office, to leading architecture transformations for healthcare systems... all before turning 23. We cover the real cost of moving fast in tech, my shortcomings with building a personal brand early on, and what I'd tell anyone who's just getting started.

From a career-ending knee injury in my first semester of college to leading development for healthcare organizations serving 40,000+ patients daily, there were many bumps in the road in my tech journey. In this article, I walk through how I went from the front desk of an optometry office to a software engineer in healthtech, and what the transition from thinking about healthcare as a patient to building for it as an engineer actually looks like.

Have you ever solves a problem so thoroughly that you created three new problems in the process? That is Developer Tunnel Vision, and it's more common than most devlopers would admit. I share a story from early in my career that taught me how hyper-focusing on one dimension of a problem can blind you from the health of the entire system, and how you can start thinking in systems intead of just tickets.