I started out as a civil engineer. After graduating I joined a consultancy that looked after road infrastructure, which is where I learned how to work with clients and turn mountains of numbers into decisions. It was practical, unglamorous work, and it taught me that infrastructure is only noticed when it fails.
Computers were always my side passion. I began with Visual Basic as a hobby, then moved on to mobile experiments with Xcode and Xamarin. Eventually the hobby took over. I moved to a software company serving the construction industry, a nice bridge between my two worlds. I ended up in nearly every role in software development, writing C, C++ and .NET, and finally became build manager, leading a complete overhaul of the build and release pipeline.
Then came a game studio, where I built the pipeline behind a big-budget title. It was a demanding chapter, and the culture wasn't for me. It felt too cold. It taught me how I want to treat experts, and what a workplace needs to be if people are going to do their best work. I've carried that into every team I've led since.
After that I joined a defense company, where I got serious about software engineering. Here quality isn't a nice-to-have, so I focused on test automation: building the habits, tooling and safety nets that let a team change complex software with confidence.
These days I work in the financial sector, leading a team. I defined and rolled out a DevSecOps approach, set up cloud governance in a regulated environment, moved workloads from on-prem to cloud-native, and brought cost discipline (FinOps) to the cloud. Bash and Python are my everyday tools now.
Lately AI has become a vital part of how I work. It's changed how I write code, explore ideas, and learn new things faster than I could on my own. For someone who has always taught himself, it's the best tutor and sparring partner I've had. I see it as a tool that amplifies experience rather than replaces it, and knowing what to ask, and when to doubt the answer, still takes years of practice.
I'm self-taught in IT. What I took from civil engineering is that you build things to last, and that's still how I work.