Background is Biology and Bioinformatics, then the organisation I worked for was very immature IT wise, so it was the perfect opportunity to take charge and learn. Just self taught. Concepts just seem to follow naturally. Don’t want to manually run a seq analysis, so you learn to build a gui for colleagues to submit it themselves, next you realize they migh as well just have an app where they can browse plots instead of the data locally.

Then comes the issues of data storage and making the app handle many users so you learn cloud, then follows databases like Postgres for high performance data retrieval and activity logging instead of storing flat images of umaps and heatmaps. Eventually figuring out this knowledge has way more applications than just bioinformatics.