During my pre-university education years in Morocco, there were a few subjects that I enjoyed attending and working on like English and Arabic, but I liked mostly Geometry. I'd always be looking forward to every geometry class as if I was going to an amusement park. I loved studying different shapes, the mathematical formulas to calculate the diameters, areas, diagonals, and angles.. how it all made sense. There was something so magical about the idea that parallel lines never meet :( and that if you have two perpendicular lines, and a third one that's perpendicular with one of them, then it's automatically parallel to the other one.
Then, during my university years, where I studied Business Informatics, I was always looking forward to any class with anything to do with data and different processes and ways to structure it. These were classes where we mainly studied how to design relational databases and how to optimize these structures, studying the normal forms, I loved how it all made perfect sense, and even if it seemed easy, noticing how much those rules are overlooked in the industry, and seeing how that negatively impacts whatever data schema/structure and Information System is in question.
After graduating, years went by. I had a first job as a technical consultant (mainly doing software engineering) in Morocco, moved to Canada, where I wandered through a few jobs that weren't as stimulating as I wished they'd be. Still, there was always something good about them, whether that's just moving to a new country, working in a new field to me, web development or working in a video games company with friendly people.. but still the jobs themselves weren't as fulfilling as one would wish.
After those years, I landed a job, [SPOILER ALERT] what would become the best job I've ever had... why? Everything I'd need in a job to feel fulfilled; autonomy, trust, great culture, flexible hours (seriously flexible hours), room for creativity, cutting edge technologies, a new challenging but stimulating job (DevOps, playing with automation, the cloud, good frameworks, and all that cool stuff), and above all, great and inspiring colleagues; everyone is great at what they do and loves it, and everyone is as excited about the work as I am.
The best of all is this is at a Data Visualisation company called Plotly (Although now we're positioning ourselves as a Data Science and Analytics platform company). My love for shapes and data structures is revived, and I couldn't wish for better. The irony is I'm telling this story as an assignment for a Data Visualisation and Storytelling course. The dots are all connected now, and I can finally go to bed with a smile on my face.