The start
My name is Alex and I grew up in Cupertino, California. I spent my entire childhood in CA and ended up going to college at UC Davis as well. It wasn’t until after graduation when I decided that 22 years of CA was enough, and that it was time for a change.
The middle
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study at UC Davis initially when I started school. I was undecided at first, then decided I wanted to pursue healthcare, then finally decided that organic chemistry is my kryptonite.
I ended up studying computer science and engineering at UC Davis and crammed a engineering degree into 2.5 years (it took me awhile to figure out biology wasn’t for me). Something about the flexibility, creativity and the need to focus I was able to develop while sitting through hours of debugging really made me feel comfortable and at peace. I think my favorite topics were parallel architectures and data engineering.
Upon graduation in 2018, most of my friends in tech stayed in the Bay Area, what a surprise, but I had wanted something different. I signed my first offer letter with a firm in NY, packed my bags and I was on my way to Brooklyn, NY.
The past work
I started off my career at Moody’s Analytics where I was a part of the MATR, or technology rotation program for short. I was building ETL pipelines for business intelligence with spark and Kafka for the better part of a year before deciding that finance and risk wasn’t my passion either.
Maybe a 100 year old corporation wasn’t the right environment for me, so I started interviewing around until I landed at pymetrics. I felt working in a inspired and motivated, tiny but mighty startup would fulfill the inner Silicon Valley native’s tech startup dream in me. Through two years I went from never writing a Rest API endpoint to being a competent backend software engineer. Some of my favorite projects included designing and developing an event driven system with celery and rabbitMQ, and building a SQL data abstraction layer with DBT that fed aggregated data into a ROI dashboard.
The current work
In 2021 I switched companies again and joined a Healthcare analytics startup, Komodo Health. “To Reduce the Burden of Disease”… what an inspiring mission statement. This vision blended my passion for contributing to the healthcare industry with my skill set in technology.
I’ve still got the same title: backend software engineer, but the tools and frameworks I’ve been using here are vastly different than they were at my previous gigs. My first major contribution was to take a small FastAPI application and make it production ready. This included a lot of Docker, celery workers, AWS and New Relic. I hope to write more about the new things I’m learning to share some insights I may have gained while working through these problems.
My passions
The circumstances over the last couple of years have forced me to find new ways to connect with people because of the pandemic. Gone were the days of going clubbing and bar hopping in NYC, until Summer 2021. There were no gyms that were open for over a year in the city either. Instead I had to pick up new sports like scuba diving, snowboarding and badminton.
It’s such a wonderful thing when you can share all your passions with your significant other. I’ve been blessed with meeting someone this year who shares all these hobbies, a love for traveling and a never quenched curiosity of the world 🥰
I hope to write more about my passions outside of work, and our little spontaneous getaways or yummy eats that we find in the city as well.
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