From highschool to software developer

I decided to write this post since I've recently been reflecting on the last decade of my life. Things definitely didn't turn out as expected and I ended up taking a bit of an odd path when it came to my career. I still do get those looks of surprise when I tell people that I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree but now working as a software developer. So, for fun, I decided to make a small write-up about my life career-wise until now. So if you're interested, keep reading along!

Before University

In highschool, I really had no clue what I wanted to do. I was decent at math and science but really didn't find my classes to be very engaging. In fact, the only thing I cared about at the time was playing and competing in badminton. Since I was a half-decent athlete, I thought it'd be fun to become a physiotherapist to help other athletes stay healthy and achieve their goals. When I got to senior year though, my parents who were both engineers, eventually convinced me to try out engineering. My mom would always talk about her dream of me working as a civil engineering for the government (not sure why, maybe for the stability?). So eventually I agreed and gave engineering a shot.

University

At the University of Manitoba, undergrad engineering students start off as undeclared, meaning you don't choose a department yet. To apply for a department, you had to complete something like 8 pre-requisite course which would include an introductory course specific to each department. I remember I took an Intro to Python course which I honestly hated at the time. I hadn't done any programming prior and just never quite felt engaged with the content. I had fully intended to pursue civil engineering since I really enjoyed the statics course I took first semester. However, my dumb*ss ended up missing the application deadline for a department which meant that I couldn't declare my major (or take any department-specific courses).

It ended up sort of being a blessing in disguise because the following year I took a geology course (counts towards a civil eng degree) that I absolutely loathed. I just could not get myself to be interested in soil and rocks. So last minute, I ended up choosing mechanical engineering instead because you could potentially work in the aerospace industry which I thought would be the coolest thing ever at the time (spoiler: did not ever work with airplanes). Near the end of my degree, I had already lost interest in working in the aerospace industry but I did enjoy doing lots of MATLAB for my aerodynamics and controls courses.

Career Beginnings

Shortly after graduating school, I joined a manufactury company that worked in the EV and solar industry. I was hired as a project engineer which was a pretty challenging role. I still remember how out of place I felt when I was the sole representative for our company in a Zoom call with several senior engineers at very large firms. I was still having lots of fun working with the people there and felt like I was learning lots every day.

At some point though while working there, I started to see lots of opportunities for automation when it came to my daily workflow. We primarily used excel sheets to quote projects, so I ended up creating tons of macros to speed up quoting time and accuracy which help a lot during busy season. I realized at some point that I actually had more fun writing these macros than doing my day-to-day tasks at work. So, in my own time, I re-visited Python (surprise, surprise) and ended up completing CS50's Intro to Python which I absolutely loved this time around.

Since I started really enjoying programming, I eventually ended up making the career switch and landed a position as an Software Automation Developer. Even after I landed the role, I kept spending lots of my free time venturing out into new technologies to expand my skills. I started building out full-stack application on both web and mobile. This is going to sound weird, but I honestly felt like more of an engineer building out these projects than I did when I was a Project Engineering. Maybe it's because I felt like I was truly designing and building out a product with my own hands, which I didn't feel like I was doing at my old job since they had tons of established products. It felt very empowering to say the least. About a year later, I joined our parent company's team as full-stack developer so I could really apply the skills I've been learning on my own.

Today

Now that I've worked as a Software developer for a while, it's pretty safe for me to say that I'm happy that I took the plunge and made the career switch. I was honestly scared at the time, but now I get to be around technology, design and build applications for my team which is awesome! Interestingly enough, my background in mechanical engineer is still very useful since I'm primarily building applications for the engineers at our company. So yeah, that's kind of "how I got here". It definitely didn't go according to plan (was there really ever a plan?) but things ended up working out pretty nicely.