Like most nerdy kids, the first thing I tried to code was a game. There’s something about creating a thing that reacts to a human’s inputs in an interesting and engaging way that has always been thrilling for me, and the first time I got pixels moving around on a screen, I was hooked.

I had a competing love for music though, and I decided to chase that dream as far as I could while I was still young, and thought that the only way to do that was to go “all in”. So my love for writing code was mostly put on the back burner for about 15 years. During that time, I would occasionally get a wild hair and start a project, which I would almost never complete.

In 2018, I decided it was time to make a big shift in my life and seriously pursue a career in software. I completed an six month web development bootcamp with Galvanize, which got me familiar with the basics of how web applications work, primarily focused on Node.js and a few popular SPA frameworks. Unsurprisingly, the projects I worked on in that class leaned toward games and music. I helped build a thing we called Mechaphonix, which aimed to be a web-based collaborative music tool. The application had two main views: an “amp” which would receive all messages and output the sounds, and the “instruments” which were interfaces that accepted input from accelerometers, motion tracking from the web-cam, and even an EEG toy. This was the first time I attempted to tame a stream of messages and make sense of them, and it was super fun!

After completing the bootcamp I started working at Swytch, which was a very early stage startup with the mission of incentivising renewable energy production by issuing crypto in exchange for proof of production.