Why did you decide to study Software Engineering?

I used to believe that everything happened for a reason. Navigating through life’s adversity and being a front row witness to the tragedies and sadness that life unabashedly delivers, I no longer believe that everything happens for a reason. Conversely, it is up to each of us to lasso our experiences to propel us to be the most true, manifest, and expressive versions of ourselves.

I have had a tremendously unconventional career. From an education in Computer Science, to a member of senior management of development and product management in the financial services industry, to a franchise owner in the service industry. This experience was followed up with a deep dive into e-commerce, the launch of my own product, and increased breadth of exposure to retail and omni-channel access and delivery.

Throughout this professional growth and change, I experienced a significant amount of personal transformation — built a marriage and home with my husband in which we raised our family and celebrated the normal firsts and milestones. In addition to the celebrations, I experienced devastating losses, relationship, and personal challenges. Through all of these times — both celebratory as well as challenging and uncertain, I consistently gravitated toward creating compelling experiences — expressed tangibly or through photography, it’s how I cared for myself and how I cared for my friends, family, and loved ones. It is how I continued to create, grow, and express myself.

We create experiences at every facet of our lives. Through experiences, we celebrate achievements, momentous events, social and family gatherings. The experiences we create set the backdrop for traditions that will outlive us. Just as importantly, it is through experiences that we care for ourselves and our loved ones when we grieve or struggle.

While I continued to create, I craved the rules and structure inherent in development and project management. Rules remind us that we have some control over our environment and situations. It is through structure that we can drive to work in the morning and reasonably anticipate how other cars are going to behave. As life, social, and political activities become more uncertain, we turn to the methodical to attempt to make sense and find reason.

It occurred to me that these two dynamics — creativity and structure are not mutually exclusive — that there is a place where they not only co-exist, but one becomes the platform for the other. Using technology as a canvas, rules and structure are the conduits for us to create an infinite number of experiences for ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors and for people on the complete opposite side of the globe.

To fully harness this synergy, I felt that I needed to update my technical skill set. I needed to become not only conversant in today’s technology languages and structures, but to have an in-depth knowledge of those tools and an ability to use them to create comforting, challenging, spontaneous, funny, serious, and any other number of experiences for people to return to in their time of need.