The unusual path to building software
I didn't come to this through a bootcamp or a CS degree. I came through a career that had nothing to do with programming — and that's probably the most interesting thing about this site.
Undergraduate years
Trained as an engineer
My formal education was in engineering. I learned to think in systems, to break problems into parts, and to care about whether things actually work — not just whether they look right on paper. That mindset has stayed with me through every career change since.
Past 15–20 years
A career in finance
The day job has been finance for the better part of two decades. It's a field that rewards precision, long-term thinking, and the ability to model outcomes under uncertainty. None of that is wasted when you sit down to build software — the discipline is surprisingly transferable.
Now
Building things for fun
This is a hobby. I want to be clear about that. I'm not pivoting careers. I'm not trying to launch a startup. I'm building things because I find it genuinely enjoyable — especially now that AI tools like Claude Code have dramatically lowered the floor for non-developers like me.
The first thing I built was Read to Earn — a reading platform for my kids. It started as a weekend experiment and turned into something real. This site documents that journey, and whatever comes next.
On building as a non-developer
“The most useful skill I've developed isn't writing code — it's learning to describe what I want precisely enough that the AI can build it correctly. Clear thinking expressed clearly. It turns out that's an engineering discipline too.”