My Path Never Knew How to Walk Straight

If someone had asked me years ago whether I'd be a developer one day, I would probably have answered something very sophisticated along the lines of:

"What?"

Because my path to IT never knew how to walk straight.

And the older I get, the more I think that's actually a good thing.

First there were screws

I spent a big part of my childhood somewhere between a garage, a workshop, and people who had a constant need to make, repair or take apart something.

My uncle, my grandpa, my cousin.

All of them technically obsessed.

To this day I can recall the smell of paint thinner, little boxes full of screws and nuts, and all kinds of components whose purpose I needed to figure out.

I sorted through them, handed things to my uncle, and at the same time supplied him with my philosophical reflections, roughly on the level of pondering the immortality of the beetle.

There was one thing I really loved:

that you take a lot of small pieces, each of which looks almost meaningless on its own, put them together the right way... and something big emerges that works.

Looking back, programming is actually a very similar activity.

There's just usually less paint thinner involved.

First career plan: above all, be able to take care of myself

My parents were divorced. My mom worked shifts in industry, my dad lived in Bulgaria, and because of the different living conditions there he didn't have much room to contribute to my studies.

So from early on I perceived money as something stress can grow around.

And I also had a fairly strong need not to be a burden to anyone.

As soon as I could, I started taking part-time jobs.

A supermarket warehouse.

A cash register.

Later, work for my aunt, where I started playing with websites and an e-shop.

From today's perspective, I find it interesting how much you learn precisely from the jobs you later write in the smallest font on your CV.

How to talk to people.

How to function even when you're not enjoying something at the moment.

What your time and your sense of fulfillment are worth versus money.

And also how to recognize that you admire a job but really don't want to do it for the next forty years.

Which brings me to accounting.

Business academy, banking, and the calculus that ruined it all

After business academy I enrolled in mathematics and economics with a focus on banking.

And a slight error occurred.

The thing I started enjoying most there was mathematical analysis.

Right at the start of university I found a job at an accounting firm and quickly discovered I have enormous respect for people who are able to do accounting their whole lives.

Because I wasn't. Or at least I hoped I'd find a way not to have to.

It wasn't a bad job.

It just lacked that particular feeling I had with the things that really absorbed me: that something suddenly clicks into place, starts making sense, and you need to know just a little bit more.

Meanwhile, thanks to DnD, I fell in with a crowd containing a suspicious number of physicists.

By the way, I originally managed to recruit about ten girls to play.

After a few sessions, one remained.

The rest were guys.

To this day I don't entirely know how that transformation happened.

In any case, thanks to them I started thinking about physics again. I'd always liked it, the math was there too, and the whole thing was close to that childhood "mad scientist" mode of mine. And besides, since I'd gone to business academy... no part of the school pipeline had ever had the chance to spoil it for me.

So I told myself:

Worst case, I can be an accountant even without this particular university.

What if I tried it differently?

I applied for bioinformatics and biophysics.

The labs won.

Biophysics was an amusement park for my soul

And I couldn't have done better.

Biophysics was something like an intellectual amusement park for me.

Mathematics. Physics. Biology. Instruments. Experiments. People capable of discussing at length, with total seriousness, something that would put most sensible heads to sleep by the third sentence, after which they'd gratefully forget the topic ever existed.

I also worked at a science popularization center — I started in the chemistry department. Because why clutter my head with the thing I'm actually studying. Better to do what I don't understand at all. And my last memory of chemistry was Mrs. Jurečková in eighth grade knocking my classmates' heads off over not knowing those seven dwarfs of Czech chemical nomenclature, -ný, -natý, -itý, -ičitý...

Then the "Light and Dark" department got added, physics... and we also did science shows.

And when you do science shows long enough, one day something simply catches fire.

In my case, my eyebrows and my bangs.

On stage.

During an experiment with propane-butane.

In a hotel where you feel you should apologize even to the carpet for standing on the floor at all. At an international gas industry conference. A little self-irony of fate.

I won't go into the technical details; suffice it to say a colleague had left a candle burning from the previous experiment, for atmosphere. And moved it, in a compositionally aesthetic way, close to a bowl full of soap bubbles and propane-butane.

Burning hair, by the way, really does stink.

The good news is, it grows back.

But mainly, I met amazing people there. Classmates, teachers, friends — some of whom I'm still close with today.

It was a beautiful period.

And then life rearranged itself a bit again.

Africa, the plague, and the decision to stay home

The final year of my bachelor's was hard.

Fairly wild organizational disputes were going on at the university. Within a short time our family lost several people close to us, and my mom had a serious accident.

Around that time I had the opportunity to go on an internship doing research on Yersinia pestis.

Yes.

The plague.

For someone with my kind of curiosity, a very tempting proposition.

But I knew that this time I didn't want to leave.

That my grandma wouldn't be in my life forever. That I wanted to be close to my family for a while.

Some decisions may not look optimal on a CV.

They can still be right.

So with a fresh bachelor's degree I started looking for work closer to the field, and enrolled only in remote study.

I sent my CV to a pharmaceutical company.

And to IT (even in biophysics we didn't escape Python as part of mathematical analysis — thanks, Tom — plus some C-flavored courses with C++ and so on).

IT called back first.

Sometimes the crucial career crossroads really are this sophisticated.

My first IT job and one less technical lesson

For the first year I worked at a company that developed, among other things, systems for government and technical contracts.

The team was really lovely and I learned a lot.

At the same time, I ran head-on for the first time into something I still meet from time to time:

not everything can be fixed with even more effort.

Sometimes something breaks in communication, and it's right to ask:

What could I have done better?

It's a good question.

It's just not always a good one.

Because there are situations where you do what you can, and further analyzing no longer leads to a better solution — only to you taking on responsibility even for things that aren't yours.

For a while I considered the transfer to another department I'd been offered.

But then a friend talked me into coming to look at the company he was leaving because he was moving away. Apparently he'd mentioned me to the boss, who was already clearing a desk for me. Panic! I hesitated for a moment, because there were a few question marks.

In the end, though, I was lured by the chance to get into manufacturing.

So I treated the interview a bit like a field trip.

And then I walked into the production hall.

And that was it for me

The hum of machines.

Conveyors.

Sensors.

Robotic arms.

Fixtures.

All those moving doodads that send something somewhere, turn it, hold it, measure it or check it.

And at the end, a real, functional car part drops out. Mostly a headlight.

I fell completely in love with that environment.

Maybe because it reminded me of a world I'd loved since childhood.

Only instead of a garage, an enormous production hall stood in front of me.

And somewhere among those machines was software.

MES, or when code actually moves things

I joined the department handling the MES system, that is, the Manufacturing Execution System.

Simplified, it's a layer somewhere between the big enterprise systems like SAP and the PLCs that directly control the machine itself.

MES needs to know, for example:

what is to be produced,

what belongs where,

how much of what we have,

which route a particular part took,

how long an operation lasted,

and whether the correct component was mounted where it was supposed to be.

For a child who once sorted screws and investigated what belongs to what, it was an almost suspiciously exact job.

On top of that, software suddenly wasn't an abstract thing hidden away somewhere in a computer.

It had physical consequences.

When something didn't work, material, an operator, or a piece of the production line could be left waiting somewhere.

When everything worked right, production kept moving.

My planned field trip ended up lasting five years.

One of Mr. Covid's restructurings

Originally it was a position that involved traveling to plants around the world.

Covid changed that a lot.

Plenty of things we'd been convinced had to be handled on-site suddenly had to get solved over the internet somehow.

And quite often, it worked.

So there was far less traveling.

We kept going to Slovakia, though, and that was really nice.

Great colleagues, beautiful countryside, bike trails, a castle, mountain taverns and real Slovak halušky.

And cats.

In the outdoor area of one plant, cats roamed around.

So you could be solving an incident in production, a database, or some integration, and on the way out meet a furry colleague who cared about the whole problem approximately zero percent.

A very healthy attitude to work.

In the end, maybe they weren't detours

Later, already as a mom, I told myself that since I work in computer science, I might as well study it properly too.

So alongside maternity and work I took up computer science remotely.

And suddenly it began dawning on me that the things which from the outside look like a completely chaotic sequence of decisions actually hang together quite well.

Business academy.

Mathematics.

Biophysics.

Experiments.

Science popularization.

Websites.

Manufacturing.

MES.

Development.

Systems thinking.

If I drew my career as a map, it would look a bit like a quest line in an RPG that the player is, for some reason, completing in entirely the wrong order.

But in hindsight it makes sense to me.

And that's exactly why I no longer really believe in lost time.

Some things come back to you only ten years later.

Something you learn in mathematics, you use in programming.

Something from the lab, in debugging.

Something from the cash register, in communicating with a person.

And something from a failed work situation, at the moment you need to recognize that further effort is no longer perseverance, just a refusal to leave.

You don't have to have it figured out at eighteen.

Or at thirty.

You don't have to throw away all your previous experience just because you changed fields.

A detour isn't automatically a mistake.

And curiosity isn't a career disorder.

Sometimes you just spend a long time collecting individual screws.

And only years later find out what they were building.