About Me - My Story In Short

"Racing, competing, it’s in my blood. It’s part of me, it’s part of my life. I’ve been doing it all my life and it stands out above everything else." - Ayrton Senna

My first venture into programming started when I was nine, trying to make my own platformer using Multimedia Fusion. Making programs with MMF can't be exactly called coding. Since it used instead a very powerful event system bringing things to life without ever touching the keyboard. It taught me all the basics of using variables, conditional statements and various flows that came later when I touched my first real programming language, Visual Basic. The rest was history, and unfortunately, I became the most fluent in Java.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

However, the love for technology started way earlier, when my father brought up from the recycling room an old IBM suitcase computer that ran DOS with a bunch of floppies for very rudimentary games. So I'm somewhat dating myself by saying that my first ever user interface was the command line. Today, I do everything on a convertible laptop, whether it's reading books, taking handwritten notes or drawing. I feel grateful to live in an era where you have access to the Internet wherever you go.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

Writing was a more recent love. In late high-school, I was rewriting endings to Shakespearean plays and there was something just so magical and cathartic about it. My first software engineering internship I realized early on the importance of documentation, when the company's decades old customer information system had nothing. Exposing to me the nightmare of maintaining legacy systems.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein

I'm at the intersection of engineering, science, philosophy and art. There's an innate joy of bringing various disciplines into one idea. Whether it's architecting a server backend, writing documentation that makes the complex accessible, or trying to figure out the meaning of life. I don’t know if being a leftie is the reason, but I thrive on creativity which isn’t bringing things out of thin, but rather looking at all the amazing work others have done and join them together as a new whole. And don’t dare call it a product, it’s an experience, living and breathing.

"Our age reveres the specialist but humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things" - Robert Twigger

I hate that somewhere, I have to talk about my credentials, because apparently we need to box ourselves into a job title so that we make more sense to other people. Professionally, I'm a business analyst who focuses on technical writing though my background is in software engineering. At home though, perhaps I'm an autodidact, a self-made person, always learning, always growing. I find motivation and admiration in the tales of the great polymaths of the past. Today's obsession with specialization honestly makes me a bit sick.

"The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller." - Steve Jobs

What really pulls at my emotional strings is stories. I love telling them and making out a story even when explaining an inherently technical system like a bootloader through narration. And of course, I fall hard when someone tells a story with aesthetic resonance: that gives me goosebumps. I'm upset that technology today strips away the human soul in exchange for something artificial in all the wrong ways.

"Medicine is for the body what philosophy is for the soul." - Ibn Sina

At the end of the day, what makes me feel alive is introspection, finding out about new perspectives about the world. Having a life when I'm alone and another one when I'm out mingling with people. The word 'rest' doesn't exist in my lexicon and have this delusion that every moment should be fruitful. But when I'm at the verge of breakdown, I play video games, watch entertainment, listen to music, just like everybody else.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” - Howard Thurman

My hobbies mostly revolve around technology, anything that lights up gets me lit up too. While my life and deepest crush is reading mostly non-fiction with a penchant on philosophy, science, pop culture and technology; though I’m open to anything really. I write a lot, even if it will never be published. Otherwise, I really dig research, especially since I’m not stuck in academia doing it. While I’m not doing it as much professionally anymore, I still enjoy the challenges of developing software, and not just coding. I’m an aviation geek with thousands of hours playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, but any other kind of vehicle simulator will tickle my fancy, with my current obsession BeamNG.drive. Out of all the forms of therapy that I’ve learned, driving is the most effective, and I like to flex that I drive standard daily. Otherwise, being alone in nature helps empty my mind and the company of others recharges my batteries. That’s why I founded the Ottawa Computing Group Social Club.

"I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy. Because they know what it feels like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anybody else to feel like that." - Robin Williams

Maybe my daily fight is my mental health issues which I find hard to open up about because of how poorly understood they are. I'm diagnosed with bipolar schizoaffective disorder and borderline personality. The truth is, we break down a lot, there's a lot of bad days, but my life is still full of meaning and wonderful moments. My condition is part of my identity at this point, and I just want to break down the stigma behind so people don't feel ashamed when they reveal their invisible disabilities.

"You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Lastly, I love chaos and embrace it wholeheartedly. Quirkiness is so attractive to me. While meticulous planning and a cohesive process are a recipe for success, I really think it's unproductive when you want to change people's lives. A vivid vision and a dream are so much more meaningful than a bunch of JIRA tickets. Within that mess, I read obsessively and embrace various hobbies but in the important moments try to be one with nature.

"Vision without execution is daydreaming, but execution without vision is a nightmare." - Bill Gates

I do love getting in touch with people from all sorts of worldviews and parts of the world. I love sharing. So if you have anything to share, or want to tell a cool story, or just pass by and say hello. Please, I'd be elated to hear from you wherever and whenever you're from. My social links are on the top of this page.

"But my own wings were not for such a flight, except that, smiting through the mind of me, there came fulfillment in a flash of light. That my volition now, and my desires, were moved, like wheel revolving evenly, by love that moves the sun and starry fires." - Dante Alighieri