Why software
I've loved solving problems since I was a kid, starting with the Rubik's cube my mom introduced me to. I found programming in 7th grade and have been writing code ever since. What I still enjoy most is finding a problem and working through the steps to fix it.
At Humana, I worked on a Databricks pipeline that processes about 35 million member records a day.11. Databricks, medallion architecture (bronze, silver, gold layers), Python. Software Engineering Intern, May 2026 – Aug 2026. It was written a long time ago and had built up a lot of technical debt, so the team wanted that section rewritten, refactored, and optimized. It was also one of the first projects the team did with AI assistance.22. Used Claude Code throughout the refactor.
The best part was the people. In school, almost everyone I've worked with has been my age, so we were all learning from the ground up together. At Humana, I worked every day with engineers who had years more experience than me, and I got to learn from their stories while building software for the company.
Why quant dev
I started investing in the stock market in 7th grade, the same year I found programming. In the spring of 10th grade I discovered trading, and I've been at it for a few years now, though not consistently at first. Today I trade micro equity index futures during the New York open through a funded prop firm account.33. MES and MNQ, roughly 9:30 to 11:00 AM ET.
Eventually the two hobbies started to overlap. I built Folia to analyze my portfolio on metrics like diversification, and I built Ledge because I wanted a trading journal I could customize more than the ones already out there.44. Folia: client-side JavaScript with Tesseract.js OCR, no backend. Ledge: React, TypeScript, Express, SQLite.
Journaling changed how I look at my trades. I started reviewing them more analytically, looking for patterns in what I was doing and for ways to improve my strategy and workflow.
Programming and the stock market have always been my two favorite hobbies. Once I learned what quant dev actually was, I realized it's essentially a combination of the two, which is exactly the kind of work I want to be doing.