They say a jack-of-all-trades but master of none is still better than a master of one. As you may see from my professional experiences in customer service, retail, construction, finance, and tech I certainly fall into the J.O.A.T. category. In all of these pursuits I found common threads that drew me in: a chance to solve challenging problems and opportunities to learn something new.

Personally I also have many hobbies and interests like mechanics, coffee, and software. I'm a home mechanic who has been wrenching on my own vehicles since the first week with my first car, a baby-blue 1980 Fiat Spider. I currently just own a 2000 Suzuki SV650 motorcycle, a sort of hybrid between sport and touring, naked and fairing-ed. Whenever I mention my only vehicle is a bike the say a variant of "but what if it's raining?". My answer is always "then I'll get wet". There's something particularily freeing about accepting discomfort like this, it's okay to be uncomfortable because that's how you learn about yourself.

My other passion is coffee. I've spent a decent chunk of time working in coffee, but it has been many more years of seeking out, preparing, sharing, and enjoying specialty coffee. One of the things I enjoy most about coffe, and specialty coffee in particular is that all over the world you have a chance to share the experience of an amazing cup that transcends any language barriers. Living in Egypt and travelling to places like Romania, I've been able to meet great new friends through coffee and it's always something I enjoy. The coffee I tend to drink may be expensive, but I try not to be a snob about it - everyone's taste is different and that's a great thing. Besides, in a choice between no coffee and bad coffee, I'll choose a warm cup of joe any day.

I graduated with a B.B.A. in corporate finance, interested in putting my skills to use performing research and analyses on investments. When I turned to the job market I found banking careers to be sparse in Vancouver, and the connections and credentials required to land them lacking on my end. I turned to my previous summer job in construction where I was invigorated by working with my hands and managing the process of building a house from nothing but a stack of wood. Framing houses is a job I thoroughly enjoyed (although the weather some days tried to solve that) and it is still something I miss doing.

I had been interested in tech and programming since around 2018 when I entered a programming competition called Battlesnake. Competing head-to-head in the classic game of Snake, I coded an 'AI' serpeant and was promptly knocked out in the first round. Through the subsequent years I worked mainly on a pet-project called FinMesh which helped hone my Python and data management skills.

In the summer of 2021 I was given the incredible opportunity to move to Egypt and step back from a job and focus on upgrading my technical skills. The hope was that in a few months I could land an entry-level remote position in tech and leverage that to move into development roles. Through Codeacademy I took several courses in Python, SQL, JavaScript and web design and felt decently equiped to take on a new role. We both figured that with so many companies going 'remote' in the wake of Covid-19, it would simple to find a job.

I submitted hundreds of job applications across all sorts of companies, but it seemed that when companies say 'remote' they actually just mean 'you need to live in the same city as our office but you can work at home'. Not exactly ideal when I live in Egypt. Finally in January of 2022 I accepted a job as a Support Engineer at MonetizeMore and the timing could not have been better. I was less than a week away from booking flights home to go back to work in construction.

Getting to apply my self-taught JavaScript has been challenging and rewarding, and I've had a chance to dive more into front-end debugging and development. I continue to work on personal projects and learning new things. I'm looking forward to studying and investigating new topics soon like C/C++, network protocols, advanced backend engineering, hobby hardware such as ESP32, and Linux From Scratch where I plan to build a custom Linux distro for daily driving.