Hello All!

My name is Angel Davila. I have been a software engineer now for a little over 6 years. Welcome to my origin story.

How the dev journey began

I was born in DeKalb, Illinois. I was raised in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. My father and uncles studied electrical engineering and made a career out of it. I eventually followed in their footsteps.

After high school I went straight to community college for electrical engineering, then eventually Southern Illinois University, also for electrical engineering.

During this time I actually got an opportunity to work at Keyence starting in the repair department with the goal to move into a junior electrical engineer position.

Eventually that did happen and I was continuing to go to school at SIU. During college, I started to fall in love with software development and took as many CS courses as I could.

This took me on a journey to self teach myself everything I could about software development. I recognized that I was more interested than normal in this field and decided I wanted to pursue a career in software development.

It was something I talked to my wife about. I told her that this didn't feel normal, I was too excited about it everyday and I knew this was what I wanted to do. It wasn't going to just be a hobby.

This led to me pushing myself to learn fast. And I was able to find opportunities at my position at Keyence to build some web applications with Python / Django, which are applications that are still used to this day. 6 years later.

Because of this, my manager at the time encouraged me to try to move into the software engineering department at Keyence. Which eventually happened.

Salesloft

During my time as a software engineer at Keyence, I met a senior manager from the business development department, who I was working closely with on some projects. He was pretty impressed with my enthusiasm and knowledge of software with the little time I had spent on it.

He eventually left, joined Salesloft and recommended me for a position as a software engineer, which I landed.

At my time at Salesloft, I worked on projects like internal tooling, user priority features, AI features, software quality tooling, complex syncing features, and more.

While at Salesloft, I decided to finish my computer science degree, since they helped pay, at SNHU.

Passion

One of the things you will recognize very quickly is my will, drive and passion for software development. I spend a lot of time doing this, many hours, after work, on the weekends, any time I have free time.

This is something I do not see from other engineers I've worked with. It's pretty hard to find engineers who do that.

I do it so much I help out with open source projects, created a side project that now has become a SaaS product with real users, and I'm involved heavily with all of the AI tooling.

There is no doubt in my mind that I will make an impact to any development team I join.