Why… everything?
From Epidemiology to Software Engineering
3 years ago I was working at an Oncology Research lab recruiting patients (processing human tissues and epidemiological data) for clinical essays. I wasn’t really interested in coding… but I was deeply concerned about efficiency and improving processes.
Here is how programming came into my life and blew my mind.
Some background
When I was about 7 years old, my father came to the room where my sister and I were cheerfully playing and told us “we have a computer!”. We jumped and ran to find a big box… and then decided to continue playing with our amazing aquatic game on the terrace, which seemed far more interesting to us during one of the hot Andalusian summers, than all those cables and weird stuff… that was until we understood all the things we could play there.
It was the beginning of the 90s when my parents, who didn’t have any previous tech skills, in a totally Mandalorian moment, brought up the idea:
This is the way: 286 PC, MS-DOS, and a 56 Kb/s internet connection.
During our first week with it, we learned how to break it (I guess our installer’s wallet loved our “researching” spirit).
After a few days, we were comfortable navigating with MS-DOS commands, I even remember feeling like “cheating” when migrating to Windows 3 (I always felt faster with commands!).
It was like a second language that I was naturally starting to learn, speaking with “something” I didn’t deeply know and just beginning to understand. Like your first time in a foreign country, learning how to ask for food, directions…
I just wanted to keep learning how to communicate and understand its responses.
In a few years, my parents, who were self-taught, were working as developers and IT maintenance.
It was easy to assume that I could have chosen coding because of their influence… Surprise! I didn’t.
Having the “why” attitude
I always wanted to discover “why everything”. That’s why I studied Environmental Sciences. It’s a field that combines different sciences focusing on how to understand flows and connections, which sounded amazing to me.
After my degree, I wanted to know how the environment affects humans, so I specialized in the effects of pollutants on human health. I loved planning the best protocols to investigate some new hypotheses, analyzing results in blood, fat tissue, placenta… and understanding how both human and environmental systems interact among themselves.
When I finished my PhD I wanted to go deeper into Research efficiency, and that’s where I discovered Biobanks: the entities that maximize possibilities because of combining the best of the laboratory techniques with large epidemiological datasets analysis. Biobanks provide Research groups with the possibility to access this huge amount of information, hence reducing bias and increasing statistical confidence in results.
Reading that description now, it sounds to me like programming was totally needed, but I wasn’t really aware back then. I just wanted to help researchers to have better databases (Software as a Service!).
The turning point
At this point everything happened so fast: I took my first online basic course, I felt like solving riddles and always finding more “but why?” questions to respond to!
Before finishing the course I had this clear idea in my mind: I want to know why. “Why” what? “Why” everything. (Yep, not ambitious at all, I know).
I got a grant for a coding bootcamp, I asked for a temporary leave from the lab to study… and couldn’t go back. Programming swept me off my feet. I wanted to keep learning, connecting dots, and understanding why everything!
The first time you see your code running, something returning from the terminal, the browser, something built by you, all the gears about how it works spinning in your head… this experience is so powerful and exciting!! The truth is that even after all these years, I keep feeling this rush when starting my local server…
The addiction
Do you know that feeling when you are struggling with some hard puzzle, playing an escape room, on the last level of a videogame… and you are so close to discovering how to finish? That feeling of “I need to solve it”, that adrenaline rush when you see it solved and understand why…?
If you do, then you know why I love coding.
Today
Now I’m part of the cool Customer Service team (a.k.a. Lannisters, you know, we always pay our -tech- debt), at CoverWallet, where we focus on our amazing multiservice platform for our customers.
…And of course, I keep searching for the “why everything”, every day.
