My path has been complex:

• I have studied Electrical Engineering during my undergraduate studies.
• I have then studied Mathematics at the graduate level.
• I have worked as a Mathematics Professor for about 7 years.
• I am now a professional Python programmer.

Q: How did that happen?

A: Python started out as being a hobby of mine, maybe since 2014 or 2015. I first started using it because I was curious about it. My first programming language was C++. From my own humble point of view, I liked the fact that if you wanted to do some scientific programming, you had many official Python libraries to help you accomplish your work, such as Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib.

Note: recently, I should mention that I really enjoyed the way the Julia programming language was doing things for scientific programming and I think that Julia may have a big impact on the scientific programming community in the near future. Time will tell.

In addition to the above Python libraries, I have played around a bit with Panda, for data manipulation (a very useful library!), some libraries for automating tasks (which I have used to shuffle problems and answers for multiple choice exams) and I have played around a bit with Django (a Python library which enables you to interact with a database on a server, create Content Management Systems, restful APIs etc.).

I have recently started working for a company as a Python programmer. I am now using virtual Python environments, a professional IDE for Python called PyCharm which is really helpful (I wonder why I was not using serious IDEs before!), pushing code onto a server using the magic of git and learning a lot in the process.

This is my story. Does it mean I will stop doing research in Mathematics? No. I mean it will be more difficult to find time for it though. I am enjoying programming though, so it is good!