Changing career paths

I’m 28 years old. I am of course still young, but the majority of my friends, as myself, have been working for a couple of years already.

For the past few years I have been working on academia. Since even before I finished my engineering studies, in the Molecular Biology institute of Barcelona, till now at the Wolfson Wohl Cancer Research Centre. Not forgetting the fantastic 3 years I spent at Science for Life Laboratory.

During these years in academia I’ve learned a ton, and wouldn’t change that for anything. I’ve evolved professionally, learning to deal with real world problems and helping with the architecture of big genomics infrastructures, coding on software used for health research, making tools to ease scientists lives, and more. I’ve evolved personally, by meeting awesome and humble people! I will always be amazed with the capacity of most scientists to learn programming and software development just because they need to, being something totally out of their comfort zone .

However, it is time for me to move on. After these years I feel stuck in my technical development. Besides all what I’ve learned, academia’s focus will always be life sciences research, not software engineering. And please don’t misunderstand me, this is how it should be! But for me, a software engineer with passion for engineering challenges and technology, it is not enough. I guess that I never really got into the research part of the bioinformatics, my interest has always been on the technical part of it, and I’ve been getting frustrated seeing how despite the limitless possibilities, lots of times interesting engineering projects get put aside because of lack of funding, developers or interest.

Soon I will be starting as backend software engineer in a small Stockholm startup called Fanzone. In a few words:

Fanzone enables professional athletes to become their own media channels. A one stop solution for these athletes to help them create content, distribution, analytics and monetization of their brand.

In Fanzone I’ll be taking care of the backend architecture, from the internal API to the content management system for the athletes. I’m very excited about it and I’m sure it’s going to be amazing!

Have I taken the right decision? That’s something that only time will say. One thing for sure: I’m very proud of it, and I’m sure that I’m gonna have so much fun in the coming months !