I started in finance — CFA, structured products, the whole serious-young-banker thing. In 2011 I picked up JavaScript on Codecademy and took Odersky's Scala class on Coursera back when MOOCs were still a fresh idea. I kept finding excuses to learn new languages.

A pivot to R led to a stint as a research collaborator in statistics and a co-authored paper in the Human Resource Management Journal. Around the same time I started a Master of Advanced Studies in economic crime investigation — antiterrorism specifically — and ended up using R and JavaScript on a Neo4J graph to build a Bitcoin compliance and tracing platform; Neo4J Certified Professional came out of that. That was 2016, when "blockchain forensics" still got blank stares.

The platform got me hired as a senior software engineer at a Zurich startup. Salesforce sat at the heart of the product but no engineer wanted to touch it, so I taught myself the platform, made Ranger, picked up AWS Solutions Architect along the way, and a few months later was technical architect — most of our work was integrations into SF.

That eventually landed me at a newly-funded Zurich startup called Unique, where I led the integrations team and now run product for the MCP work — which is, of course, mostly integrations. The pattern is hard to miss.