Hello All!

My name is Angel Davila. I have been a software engineer for a little over 6 years now, and this is the first post on my blog. I figured the best way to kick things off is to tell you how I got here.

TL;DR

I started in electrical engineering at Keyence, taught myself software on the side, and moved into a full-time SWE role within about two years. Salesloft is where I really leveled up. This post is my origin story and what you can expect from the blog going forward.

How the dev journey began

I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. My father and uncles are all electrical engineers, so when I graduated high school it felt like the obvious path to follow.

After some community college I transfered to Southern Illinois University where I majored in electrical engineering, and during my time there I was abel to find an opportunity to work for Keyence.

I initially started in the repair department with the goal of eventually moving into a junior electrical engineer role, which happned just a few years later.

Since EE requires some CS courses, I really started to find interest in software development and tried to take as many CS courses as I could. As I entered the world of software development, something clicked, and it hasn't been the same since.

I started spending any free time I had just learning and building things, taking udemy courses, watching youtube videos, reading documentation and books. I was hooked! I still am to this day.

During this time of learning, I started to recognize that it was more than just a little interest, I knew this was something I wanted to do for a career. This was in 2019, the year we got married, and I told my wife that I was readdy to go all in, a descition which she happily supported.

I set a goal, that I wanted to be move to a software engineering role within 2 years. I work hard to learn as much as I could, try to implement apps at Keyence and hopefully gain some experience that would help me land a role building software full time.

This is exactly how it played out. My manager at work started to notice my enthusiasm and drive to learn and build software and gave me opporutnities to build tools for our team.

I built a few internal web applications at Keyence using Python and Django, which are actually applications which are still being used today, over 6 years later.

My manager recommended me to the software development team and lusckly around this time, which was in 2020, they were looking to fill a role.

I applied, and got it.

Salesloft

While I was working as a software engineer at Keyence, I was collaborating closely with a senior manager from the business development side on a few projects. He saw how much I cared about the work and how quickly I was picking things up.

He eventually left Keyence and joined Salesloft and not long after, he recommended me for a software engineering position there. I interviewed, got the offer, and made the jump.

Salesloft was where I really leveled up. I got to work across a wide range of problems. I built internal tooling that engineering teams relied on daily. I shipped user-facing features that were tied directly to customer priorities. I worked on AI-powered features, software quality tooling, and some complex data syncing systems that taught me a lot about building things at scale.

It was also at Salesloft where I decided to go back and finish my computer science degree. They had a tuition program, so I enrolled at SNHU and got it done while working full time. It felt good to close that loop.

What drives me

I spend a lot of my time outside of work writing code. Nights, weekends, whenever I have a free hour. I genuinely enjoy it. It's not something I force myself to do, it's just where my mind goes.

I contribute to open source projects when I can. I built a side project called Copia that started as a personal tool and has grown into a real SaaS product with actual users. I'm deep into the AI tooling space and constantly experimenting with new ways to build.

I know that level of commitment isn't common, and I don't say that to put anyone down. I just know what I bring to a team. When I join somewhere, I show up with energy, curiosity, and the kind of drive that makes the people around me better.

What this blog is for

I'm going to use this space to write about the things I'm learning, building, and thinking about. Some posts will be technical. Some will be more personal. All of it will be honest.

Thanks for reading. More to come.