shaun chander, the long version.

I started programming in 2016 as a hobby. I’d been interested in web design since I was 12, and most of what I learned in those early years was by doing.

I went to college on the premed track. My days were filled with biochem, organic chem, the whole thing. Alongside it I ran a small web design company called Syncore on nights and weekends. By senior year the side work had outgrown the studying, and I dropped out to run it full-time.

Syncore led to my first product engineering job at an early-stage startup. From there I joined Rilla as a founding engineer and helped build the early product. After Rilla I spent some time on my own ideas — most went nowhere, and I learned more from those misses than from anything else. Today I’m a product engineer at Candid Health.

Most of what I know I picked up in the trenches, usually by doing the wrong thing first. That’s still how I work.