How I got here

I started university in September 2022. Looking back, the road there is a short story, and the thread running through it is one I only recognized later.

#Minecraft, first

The first code I wrote that anyone else used was Minecraft mods. They were small things, the kind of mod that adds a block or tweaks a mechanic, but a few of them ended up in modpacks that other people downloaded and played. Knowing that people I'd never met were running my code felt amazing and slightly terrifying at the same time. If it broke on their machine, in a setup I'd never seen, that was still my problem.

That was my first lesson in "works on my machine" not being the same thing as "works".

#The skin market

In high school I got interested in a video game that had a real market for cosmetic skins. Prices moved, people traded, and there was an order-book feel to the whole thing. I started automating my trading there, nothing grand, mostly scripts that watched prices and acted faster than I could by hand.

What I actually learned was that the price on the screen and the price you get are two different numbers. By the time you act, the listing is gone, or someone was faster, or the fee eats the edge you thought you had. Markets stopped being an abstract thing on the news and turned into a very concrete engineering problem: how fast can you see, how fast can you act, and how honest are you being about the costs?

Later note: I came back to this market years afterwards, across North American and Chinese marketplaces, and wrote it up in trading the gap in CS:GO skins.

That gap between the quote and the fill has been the thread through almost everything I've built since.

#Choosing a program

So when it came time to pick, I chose Computer Science at Toronto Metropolitan University, with a minor in Finance. CS because I wanted to build the systems, finance because I wanted to understand what they're for. I went in with a lot of questions and very few answers, which was the right ratio.

1. Middle schoolMinecraft modsThe first code other people ran, in modpacks I'd never see.
2. High schoolAutomating a skin marketScripts that watched prices and acted faster than I could. The first time the quote and the fill were different numbers.
3. Sept 2022Computer science and finance at TMUCS to build the systems, finance to understand what they're for.
4. Jan 2023An internship where code runs somewhere that mattersNokia, in Kanata.

#Where I'm pointed

Two directions interest me, and I think they're closer than they look. One is software engineering at a large company, where systems serve millions of requests and the discipline around shipping is the product. The other is quant development and low-latency trading, where microseconds matter and the market grades your code every day.

Both reward the same habits: measure before optimizing, test your assumptions against what the system actually does, and be honest about scope. I'm going to try to practise those here, in public, and write about it when I get something wrong.