I presently live in Vancouver, BC, Canada but I am originally from Toronto, Ontario. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 5 years, and have spent significant chunks of time on business in Tokyo, Japan.
I attended the University of Toronto, completing my undergrad degree in the Life Sciences, with the goal of attending medical school and practicing medicine. Core to that goal, was my innate desire to help people which I hoped to merge with my tendency to do well in the subjects of Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics.
I got quite far down this road before getting a taste for the lifestyle that Medicine would necessitate before realizing that it wasn’t for me. Luckily, my passion for technology and engineering was strong (stronger than for Medicine, really) and I was able to put this to good use; when I was young, I had not realized how I could turn this into a career, so I had always treated it as a hobby (throughout my university life, I had spent [and still do spend] an inordinate amount of time reading technology [software and hardware] blogs, always staying up to date with the industry [the same is true for the automotive industry as well]). Through a bit of an unplanned detour, I took an internship at a budding Canadian tech company and it changed my life. It became immediately obvious to me that this field was where I belong; this was where ”my people” had been all along! I ended up staying well past my initial 3 month term and took on more and more responsibility quarter after quarter, year after year. After an acquisition of that company, I eventually worked my way to Team Lead of the IT Department which then ultimately led to a relocation to the SF Bay Area to head up the creation of a new Americas-wide IT Department, while also unifying and integrating existing satellite teams.
Wanting to dive back into day to day engineering to gain experience with newly emerging technologies, and not having an open lane to a management position within the Org (since those roles were often appointed by headquarters with one of their people from overseas), I decided to pivot into DevOps and was once again entrusted with an opportunity to learn and grow into a role where I could apply existing skills in a new way while soaking up a ton of cutting edge technologies and concepts that were entirely new to me.
I am passionate about building great products, both physical and virtual, and am driven to ensure that solutions are well designed at every layer.