In the beginning of 2013, when I finished my bachelor in electrical engineering with a specialization in image processing, we were in the middle of the “app boom”. The market was getting overwhelmed with apps and companies were investing a lot of resources, so it was a good opportunity at the time in order to quickly find a job. A friend of mine in the university was learning how to program apps and I joined him in the computer lab of the university for several afternoons to get acknowledged with the new SDKs. I was very excited and had (too) many ideas, but then it happened: I got stuck, I could not get things done, time passed and the excitement went away. I needed something for long term so, in the meantime, I was learning and experimenting with python. And I kept doing that for long time.
Font: Apps for stupid people
The chosen one
Interviews came and went but I could not see myself in a big consultant company. “It is what everybody is doing”. I felt awkward and not sufficiently motivated.
After a break in the search of my destiny at the university cafeteria, I went to see a grant presentation which offered working in a startup. They were a startup incubator growing different small companies from the emerging smart-IT sector. When the talks finished, they put an exam in front of me. The exam was about mobile apps! I smirked. On the other hand, that was really not my thing. Anyway, I went for it.
A week after, I started to do interviews with the different startups. There were a dozen, but I could have stopped right in the second one. Most of them were offering a job for web development (frontend, backend), app development or marketing. Their ideas were good and innovative but, in general, the job I was going to perform in each would have been the same. The challenge, let’s say, was not different. Probably I would get bored after three months. However, in the second interview, I was asked to produce a map of connectivity of the brain, a thing called connectome, and to visualize it in 3D using MRI scans. How could I say no to that?
Brainiac
It has been four years since that day. I found myself sprouting out as a professional inside a startup without even realizing, like learning how to survive in a jungle or finding the way out of a maze. It has a really fast learning and growing cycle, and you get to face problems by yourself and find your way out as you can. And that is basically the challenge: dance to the startup beat.
Uncertainty, reasoning, flexibility, and rapidness were some of the skills I developed in the early days. I was writing all sort of scripts for brain image processing and getting familiar with the newest open source tools. With no one to review the code or help in its testing, it was quite challenging to build that complex pipeline system myself.
We are now more than six people working with the same code and it has changed a lot. With all the experience gathered through the years, thanks to the team-work and solving problems with strange datasets, now, the pipelines are more robust and have a better structure. When you want to show something that only you could understand, that existed only in your mind, you have to strive and brake it down into little pieces, so other people can arrange them together in a way that they can read and understand.
Beginnings are hard, but as you keep moving on and try your best, you will grow. And whatever you do will improve.
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