When I was 10 years old, I went to an informatics class with a friend and fell in love with computers—it was love at first keystroke. Two years later, I learned my first programming language: Visual Basic . I also figured out how to build and tear down PCs, earning a lot of money for a 12-year-old. The year was 2005: the beginning of my career 😂.

Down the line, I earned a BS in Information Systems. But whenever anyone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always: "Scientist!" A poor choice financially, but a great one for passion. Later on, I went on to complete an MS in Computer Science.

In 2018, I landed a job in AI right at the dawn of the deep learning boom. Word2Vec had come out five years earlier, and everyone was building on top of it. The original Transformers paper had just dropped the year before. I didn’t know TensorFlow yet, and Hugging Face’s Transformers library didn’t exist, so I spent a few weeks writing my own implementation from scratch. Pretty fun times. Today, I work in cybersecurity and build cool things.

Stay tuned for more!