To start this off, I thought I’d give a little bit of background into me and how I ended up here. The general goal of this website is a place to document my personal coding endeavours and (hopefully) act as a way to motivate me to keep up with my personal projects. My background is originally in finance. I completed a Finance degree from McGill University and then continued in finance in the same team I had interned with during my degree. I was working in an off-shoot group of sales & trading for three years. During my time with this group, I really leaned on the few computer science courses I had taken for fun at university. We were extremely short staffed and the expectations of the amount of Excel work that could be done. As a result, I started automating some of the repetitive processes. It started out small with making templates and grew to making VBA scripts to download, consolidate and ingest data to display dashboards and create reports. When the pandemic hit, I spent a lot of time reevaluating what I wanted to be doing long term and realized that I enjoyed the coding portion of my job more than the normal functions that would become a larger portion as I moved up. This led me to considering what my options were to start doing more of this work! Bootcamps had just started popping up as an option to retrain in software engineering. That seemed like a perfect solution since I was not prepared mentally or financially to go back for another 4 year degree. I chose a program I could do 100% online and self-directed in order to continue working while I made the transition. I absolutely loved it! And after completing the program, quit my job and started full time in frontend development! Frontend always appealed to me because of the immediate feedback loop of seeing what I was building. I had a short stint at Wealthsimple as an intern which as an amazing way to start out and try being full-time as an engineer. At the end of the summer, I moved on to a junior engineer position at Cohere and have been there since! It’s amazing to me every day how lucky I got in having the opportunity to make a career shift and am incredibly thankful to all the people who helped me or took a chance on me when I was getting started. Since starting full time, I’ve had plenty of ideas of side projects and have started a couple. My biggest issue previously was not feeling confident enough to start some of the ideas and, with the ones I started, I usually reached a sticking point and lost the motivation to continue. It’s been difficult dealing with some imposter syndrome as someone without an engineering background and I’m hoping this blog will let me have an outlet for what I build. Even more so, hopefully this can be of use to someone else who’s just starting out and can show that it’s totally fine to take small gradual steps towards goals.