Took some time off to figure out what I actually want to build. Made MomPop Care, an app to help coordinate care for my parents. Learning AI stuff, playing with agentic workflows, and seeing what sticks.
Longest stint. Moved a huge platform from on-prem to AWS, sped up some old pipelines by 93% (saved about $900K/year), and ended up leading a team of 7 through a messy reorg. Learned a lot about how big companies actually work.
Built pipelines that tracked music plays from Spotify, iTunes, and other platforms. The data fed into royalty calculations, so accuracy really mattered. Hadoop, Hive, Spark, the whole ecosystem.
Came to New York for this. Studied distributed systems and big data. Mostly just glad I did it.
First real job. Enterprise systems, big teams, tight deadlines. Learned how to write code that other people have to read, which turned out to be the most useful thing.