Gabe Miles

Background

About Gabe Miles

My journey with coding has been up and down. My older brother, a software developer himself, suggested I start with Lisp and the book “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.” It was very overwhelming - like very very overwhelming. I coded a few small programs, and dropped it. But what I found, even though I hated Lisp, was that I really enjoyed the problem solving aspect of coding. I started picking up Python over the pandemic summer, and started to really enjoy myself. I decided to stop doing sports science, and move to math and computer science. I loved all of my programming classes. I learned so much about what goes into an application, the planning involved, how to work as a team, data structures, databases, algorithms. I started to work with a research group where we applied our programming knowledge to machine learning applications, creating a neural network that differentiate people based on reading from a cheap EEG. Nothing award winning, but a really interesting problem to solve, and something that satisfied my curiosity for a bit. After a year of math, I found myself frustrated with the lack of applications. Pure math is full of postulation, and it’s valuable for the foundations of science. But it really wasn’t for me. I wanted something more applicable, problems that had real world consequences. Chemistry became my new area of interest, combining my interests in biology with my aptitude for quantitation that I had found in computer science and math. I had found my people and my community among chemists. And I found labs that needed my expertise. I quickly fell into simulation work, combining my scripting abilities in Bash and Python with my knowledge in chemistry. I worked for 2 years on projects related to protein-protein interactions, drug design for prevention of breast cancer metastasis, and designing additives for disrupting natural gas hydrate growth. I became the department expert of GROMACS and molecular dynamics. But by the end of my degree, I found myself coming back to software development. I started working on problems within networking and IT, setting up my own OPNsense firewall, learning about Docker and virtualization. These problems were really interesting to me, much more than simulating molecules (which is still pretty cool). Software development offers the freedom to explore that my endless curiosity desires. There are always new and interesting problems to solve, something my brain now hunts for. With programming, the world is my oyster.