rcmisk

Lover of coding, software development/engineering, indie hackers podcast/community, start-ups, music, guitar, technology, fitness, running, biking, learning new things, travel, the beach, and hiking/mountains.

As a kid I had too many interests. I grew up playing soccer from an early age and played through college! Sports and being a part of a team was always part of my DNA. Not only did I value sports and competition but I loved music, art, drawing, animation, film, computers, math, and learning.

Once I hit college, the decision to choose my life path was paralyzing, and ultimately led me down many different paths. I explored economics, finance, psychology, philosophy, statistics, communications, and marketing. I graduated with a finance degree and thought the data science, statistics, and the trends and patterns would be a fun career, however my first entry level job in the industry discouraged me to continue in the industry and to explore other paths.

I always had an itch to build and start something on my own or with family. Growing up I started a lawn mowing business, shoveling business, lemonade stands, and small Wordpress websites. I loved the creativity of coming up with ideas on how to help people and make money at the same time.

I realized I loved technology, and seeing what could be created and started with technology really urged me to start down the path of learning how to code. My brother and I had an idea for a college social network (similar to Facebook), geared solely towards education and only for students at your college. We wanted to give students the ability to meet people on campus, finding work, organize course material, share notes and materials, find extracurricular activities, sell textbooks and furniture. I took it upon myself to learn how to build something like that. Basically taking an idea and making it happen. I learned about software development, coding languages, web frameworks, startups, marketing all on my own.

I took online free courses, watched videos and tutorials about Django, Python, Javascript, HTML, and databases. I absolutely loved everything about the process. Seeing my work come to life and seeing people use what I created. It satisfied everything that I enjoyed growing up. The creativity, the design, artwork, coming up with a business, learning new things at my own pace, however I learned best, and working with my brother. I did all this while working full-time at a financial institution during my nights and weekends.

We finally launched StudentGrounds, however after a year and 200 user signups later it slowly died down. This experience of taking an idea and learning everything needed to make it a reality basically propelled my interest in learning how to code and do that full time. I learned all about computer science, taking a certificate course at night at a local university. I started another project idea on the side for an event management application for my father's youth soccer tournament, and started applying to every technology company I could think of. I ultimately got my first software engineer job at a small start up in Boston as an apprentice/intern and learned on the job before getting my first full-time software engineer position at a large Boston e-commerce company. My goal there was to learn as much as I could from season professionals, and learning how the corporate world works in terms of software development.

My ultimate goal is to create something on my own doing something I love, as well as enjoy life, and give back to others through education.

Right now I am a full-time Software Engineer with 6 years in the marketing tech space, trying to finish a SaaS boilerplate so that I can spin up any web application for any idea at the click of a button, which will then set me up for my next idea, IdeaVerify, an automated way to verify/validate you're SaaS application idea before actually starting to code and wasting many hours and years developing something that no one would use.

This blog is about my journey navigating the software engineering world, without a CS degree, building in public, keeping record of what I learned, sharing my learnings and at the same time giving back to others, teaching them how to code and giving helpful hints and insights. I am also using this blog to showcase other sides of me such as art, music, writing, creative endeavors, opinions, tutorials, travel, things I recently learned and anything else that interests me. Hope you enjoy!