Growing up, attending auto conventions was a regular outing in my family, as almost all of my relatives, including my father, were involved in the automotive industry. I vividly remember stumbling across a Red Hat Linux convention back in 2004 in Ohio at the age of 10. The name "Red Hat" caught my eye and stuck with me, though I didn't realize its significance at the time. Today, (Red Hat) Linux is not just a cool name but my favorite coding environment that fuels my everyday work in the terminal. And here's a cool fact: Linux powers over 90% of the world's supercomputers, symbolizing its robustness and adaptability.

In college, my major was Political Science at Loyola University Chicago, and coding was hardly ever on my radar. It seemed I was destined to take a different path, one far removed from the digital world. But destiny had other plans, and coding found its way back into my life. Something shifted when my professor introduced our class to Stata, a statistical software used for data manipulation to examine U.S. political trends and presidential election results. This was my first introduction to the command line interface, where we would write commands in Stata syntax to pull a pool of political data from multiple data samples to analyze statistics. I was hooked. The abstraction, the logic, the endless possibilities – all of it was mesmerizing.

What began as a mere interest soon turned into a passion. Stata paved the way, but my curiosity didn't stop there. I also took an Introduction to Computer Science class to further immerse myself in programming logic, languages, and tools. After graduating college, I began to explore Linux, Ansible, Groovy, Terraform, and much more. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I found myself immersed in code, exploring new challenges, and pushing the boundaries of what I could create.

From that chance encounter with a Red Hat Linux convention as a child to my unexpected introduction to Stata, my journey into coding has been filled with surprises and discoveries. Coding has become more than just a hobby or a job – it's a way of life. I eat, breathe, and sleep code, and every day brings a new opportunity to learn, innovate, and create something remarkable.

Today, I stand at the intersection of past experiences and future dreams. The world of coding offers endless paths to explore, and I'm excited to see where this journey takes me next. Whether I'm building new applications, contributing to open-source projects, or inspiring others to embark on their own coding adventures, I'm ready to embrace the challenges and joys that lie ahead. The code is my canvas, and I'm just getting started.