My Origin Story: From Syringes to Software

Photo by Ousa Chea on Unsplash

“Sometimes the path finds you long before you recognize you’re walking it.”

I didn’t plan on becoming a software engineer. In fact, if you had met me as a teenager in Brazil—hunched over one of the many Encyclopedia Britannica volumes we had at home or scribbling chemical equations on scratch paper—I would have told you I was going to cure genetic diseases and start my own research lab in Australia. People from all over the world would fly there to be treated. All free of charge. That was the dream. Technology wasn’t even in the picture.

But life doesn’t care about your plans—it hands you moments. And sometimes, if you’re willing to follow them, those moments quietly redirect the entire course of your life.

I spent the first two years of high school in Brazil before my family uprooted and moved to the United States. One day I was playing soccer with neighbors and listening to Legião Urbana; the next, I was dropped into Cliffside Park High School in New Jersey without knowing a single word of English.

I remember sitting in the school cafeteria on my first day, staring at a tray of mystery food and hearing nothing but noise around me—like a radio just off-tune. People laughed, shouted names across tables, traded inside jokes. And I just sat there alone thinking:

“I don’t belong here.”

More than anything, I missed my friends.

I felt lost and utterly alone. Some people might’ve just given up, but luckily for me, I’ve always had a rebellious streak. I refused to stay lost.

By senior year, I had not only learned enough English to be dangerous—I earned straight As, was inducted twice into the National Honors Society, and graduated in the top 10 of my class. I didn’t have much money, or perfect English, but I had grit—and in hindsight, that turned out to be far more valuable.

Now, college made sense to me. Science made even more sense. Chemistry, biology, molecular genetics—understanding how life works fascinated me. So I earned my Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from Pace University, thinking:

“This is it. I’m going to change the world.”

It took me more than one year to finally land a temporary job as a lab technician at BD (Becton Dickinson)—a massive pharmaceutical and medical technology company. It sounded serious. Important. Scientific. I imagined myself in a crisp lab coat, surrounded by brilliant minds, helping discover breakthrough treatments.

“Now, I’m definitely going to make my impact on the world!”

Reality, though, had other plans.

Most of my time at BD was spent working for a materials engineer running experiments to test the effects of temperature and pressure on components for a new line of medical devices—mostly syringes and all their tiny parts. Day in, day out, alongside other fresh science graduates, I spent 7½ hours measuring every possible dimension of plungers and stoppers with calipers, scribbling numbers onto clipboards like a robot. Procedures. Paperwork. Repetition.

I wasn’t curing anything. I was bored out of my mind.

But boredom is a strange gift. It forces you to look for problems—and problems invite solutions.

One day, after yet another colleague misplaced their measuring tools (which happened constantly), someone said:

“We need a lab equipment tracking system. This is ridiculous.”

I went home that night and thought: Could I build one?

I didn’t own any fancy software or know anything about enterprise systems. But I did have a cheap Compaq Presario PC, a legitimate copy of Microsoft Visual Basic 6, and the dangerous belief that maybe—just maybe—I could figure it out.

So I opened a blank form in VB6.

And I started building.

I had written small programs before—usually for fun, sometimes for questionable reasons, like the time I wrote a keylogger to help a friend get back into his locked America Online account¹—but I had never built a “real” system. But the moment I made that first ugly gray button respond to a click event—something clicked in me too.

A week later, I stayed after hours and showed my boss a rough prototype of an internal tracking system. It had a clunky layout (I’m pretty sure UX hadn’t been invented yet), mismatched fonts, and a Microsoft Access “database” duct-taped behind it—but it worked.

She paused, stared at the screen, then looked at me, then back at the screen again.

“You built this?”

“Yeah,” I said, suddenly unsure. “I thought maybe it could help.”

Then I said the sentence that would unknowingly change the course of my life:

“If you want, I could build a full system for the lab, but I’d need to focus on it full-time—not as a lab tech anymore.”

She clicked around for a moment, turned to the lab manager, and said:

“Give him full access to this computer and ask IT to install whatever he needs.”

“Visual Basic 6 and Microsoft Access,” I suggested.

“Whatever he needs,” she repeated.

“And MSDN access,” I added quickly.

She smiled. “Whatever he needs.”

That one project started with a single feature, which quickly turned into two. Then five. Then ten.

Could I track equipment calibration history? Sure—give me a day.

Could I add user accounts? Give me a day.

Generate reports? Give me a day.

Print labels? Give me a day.

For the first time in my life, I felt the thrill of building something real—something people actually used. Something that solved a problem.

Is this what software engineering feels like? I wondered.

Science had always been about discovery. But this—this was creation. A different kind of power. The more problems I solved, the hungrier I became.

I spent nights digging through Visual Basic forums and full Saturdays at the Edgewater Barnes & Noble copying pages from programming books I couldn’t afford. I fell hard for code.

It was there—in the back of a fluorescent-lit lab surrounded by plastic bins of syringes—that I had my first real turning point. I wasn’t just dabbling anymore.

I was becoming a builder.

I didn’t want to hold a caliper ever again. I didn’t want to follow lab SOPs and fill out binders until my soul evaporated. I wanted to solve problems—to make things better, faster, easier.

Right around then, stories of the infamous Y2K bug were everywhere, along with rumors that companies were desperate for anyone who could write code. I wasn’t a computer science graduate. I didn’t have a code portfolio. Heck, Github wouldn’t be around for at least another 8-9 years. Half the time I barely knew what I was doing.

But that had never stopped me before.

So I printed a two-page résumé, added a brand new line—“Software Developer”—and applied for a job at a small startup closer to home: Synaptic Pharmaceuticals.

That decision would throw me headfirst into professional software engineering—rewriting legacy systems, reverse engineering tools without manuals, learning Oracle and PL/SQL on the fly—and surviving the chaos of software development before agile, DevOps, or CI/CD existed.

But more importantly, it was the moment I decided to redesign my life on purpose.

To be continued.