Started at a private university offering paid co-ops. Both companies offered extensions, and after 3 years of concurrent work and school, I chose work and got a job.
For an enterprise consulting firm I built a front-end, migrated a database, built another front-end, performance tuned a database.
A friend secured funding, so I joined to build Stratz.com for the chance to work with big data without first needing to aquire big customers. Wrote 80% of the MVP. Valve released a direct competitor.
I went and got a real job at a company all-in on cloud. Infrastructure as code, automated testing and deployments,
latest and greatest stuff.
For a while I studied machine learning (pre-transformer) as applied to algorithmic stock trading. Didn't hit the jackpot. I replicated OpenAI's Hide-and-Seek paper in an asteroids-like 'space shooter' video game.
Then I moved to Seattle and started at Amazon AWS. The pandemic hit, projects were cancelled, and we were stuck keeping the lights on for 9 months. I helped build a small react front-end, and got to experience how easy web-dev can be when all the components are built-out and difficult problems solved.
I should have switched teams, but I switched to team 'not working'.