Sometimes... it might feel like we are stuck with the decisions that we have made and, that those decision are somehow... fixed.

More interestingly, some of those decisions are even "forced" upon us.

And it is not always the situation that someone forces us directly to make the decisions we make. Sometimes we might feel forced by the pure thought of dissapointing someone.

Other times, we might be forced to make decisions, not because they are the most convenient ones for us, but because they could allow us to make better ones in the future. Even if might not immediately enjoy the times coming after making those decisions.

During my lifetime I have been presented several times with that situation.

For once, when I graduated from my bachelors degree, I was planning what would come next. I was always fascinated by software and how computers work. So I decided to apply to several master degree programs that offered attractive computer science paths.

Unfortunately, given my situation and the location I chose to applied to, back in the day... the culture was very restrictive. Universities where not letting students diverge from the studies they have previously chosen (Extra points, if you know which country I decided to move to).

So application after application, the only answer I got was...

"Please apply to a program that fits your current studies"

So I made the sane decision and applied to a program that would accept me.

Long story short, I failed most of my classes (at least the hartd ones, but I did graduate).

But it was not all in vain.

This was not going to stop me from doing what I was passionate about. I made use of the time I had (and skipped a bunch of lectures) to study computer science by myself.

I went down on a searching spree on books, content and any type of resource I could get my hands into to learn about data structures and algorithms, programming languages, compilers, transpilers, runtimes (you get the gist).

And after dreading the day of my masters graduation, the real fun began. How would I get a job in a country that is so restrictive about your current studies?

Well, you need the grind... and a little (a bunch) of luck. When I officially joined the work force, a great consultancy company had put the trust on me and gave me my first job. Although it was not specifically software development (as many know it), it was software development adjacent. I started working as a data analyst.

Sure, I was working with code and creating hypotheses about certain scenarios but it gave me the confidence and experience that working with clients, stake-holders and other colleagues can only give you.

One thing was for sure, I was good at it. Don't get me wrong, I am not THE BEST but, good enough to actually get people talking about my work.

But I was still not happy with my situation. You see, playing around with data and coming up with insightful information that leads to taking action on specific business decisions was not as exciting to me as it should have been.

At one point, I was developing a machine learning model to test the hypothesis that analyzing long audio files (~8hrs) on specific cues (labeled data), was more efficient if done by converting the audio waves to pictures and labeling them to get the timestamps and type of cue that happend at a given moment.

Part of the project was publishing the model to be consumed by others... And that reminded me of why I fell in love with software development. When I spent three hours in front of a white board sketching the different ways the model could be deployed, reused and interacted with, and I felt like it was three seconds. I had so much fun coming up with a plan, thinking about what could go wrong (defensive coding) along the process, how the UI should look like and distributing the computational load the retraining of the model would take given new inputs... it felt like home.

So after a couple of years doing what came good to me, chose to prusue software architecture.

You see, a very few things in life are set in stone. But don't let others or other circumstances hold you back from actually pursuing what you care about.

It might take us a minute to get where we want to be, and it could take us a couple of unpleasant or non-ideal situations for us to get there. But we it is totally worth it!