My journey to v1.0

Launch Day

Today is finally the day — the official launch day for OptoAI, my first publicly available software — a creation completely of my own.

A Lifelong Interest in Innovation

Before I ever knew that I would become a software developer, which I only discovered around 4 years ago, I’ve always been very entrepreneurially spirited. I’ve always been a big thinker and dreamer, never short of ideas for new things that could exist in the world, or ways that already existing things could “be better” or evolve. I’ve always been very naturally intellectually curious, and have explored and learned about so many different fields of study and facets of life to different extents — various sciences and maths, graphic design, photography, photo editing, 2D animation, 3D modeling, electronics, dance, startups, business, scientific research, scientific analysis… the list goes on.

From Pre-Med to Optometry

After being pre-med in college and deciding to postpone medical school with a gap year (which turned out to be a “gap period” of 3 years) to explore my interest in dancing by moving to Los Angeles, where I was lucky enough to become signed as a professional dancer and also started my first photography business and spent some time doing molecular cloning at a biotech startup and assisting in a few Caltech labs, I eventually decided to make a decision about my “future in medicine”, choosing to pursue a career in optometry. (tldr; my father and brother are optometrists)

Discovering an Interest in Spreadsheets

While I enjoyed school and was never lacking interest in what I was learning about with our school curriculum, I was also continuing to follow interests outside of school, specifically regarding spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel. I had used Microsoft Excel for the first time in a free 1-2 week, in-person class on the Caltech campus for Caltech employees, where I was taught the foundations.

I advanced my skills over time while working in the labs, creating various spreadsheets for the labs to make performing various tasks and experiments more efficient and less prone to error.

Building Tools in Optometry School

I continued into optometry school, where I ended up making a pretty advanced spreadsheet for meal prepping, which included formulas to determine your ideal daily macronutrient/calorie goals based on your fitness and health goals, and also the ability to add custom food items to the meal prep planning “system”, allowing you to easily plan meals to meet your daily macro goals, while at the same time telling you things like how much of each food item you would need for a week’s worth of meals so that you knew how much to buy at the store.

(I actually ended up creating a WordPress website for this and sold it online as a simple Excel spreadsheet download, making around $500-600 off of it at ~$5 per purchase. I’m still not sure how most of the people even found the website).

For my capstone project in optometry school, while the general expectation was to form a small group with other classmates and do some sort of patient research study, I ended up creating an “advanced, customizable rigid gas permeable contact lens calculator”, all within Excel and various formulas.

During one of my rotations, I also created a “business analysis” spreadsheet system and ran an analysis with KPIs and metrics for one of my externships, as well as my dad’s practice.

From Doctor to Developer

Once I graduated optometry school and started working, I was really enjoying being a doctor for my first year of practicing and largely focused on that. However, once I got a lease for a LensCrafters and suddenly gained the responsibilities of creating the entire patient experience and developing various internal systems for my optometric staff and myself, I got found my way back to my Excel spreadsheets.

Over time, I started to hit a technical ceiling with what I was able to do in Excel. I talked about it with a friend of mine that did computer programming, and he told me I should learn this programming language called “Python” in order to take my spreadsheets to the next level.

With a long weekend ahead, I decided to take an online course for it and attempt to complete it within those 3 weekend days. I did, immediately fell in love with computer programming, and the rest is history (or at least a story for another time).

A Milestone and a New Beginning

While today most obviously and directly marks a milestone that results from many hours of hard work, dedication, and focus on developing my programming knowledge and skills over the last several years, it is also less obviously, to most, a result of knowledge and skills I have gained in the many different areas of life that I have explored and spent a lot of time learning and gaining an understanding of over many more years of my life.

Even though this is just “version 1.0” of this software product, with so many more ideas and plans in store for it for the future, it feels both exciting and fulfilling to be able to have this day and to have this singular entity that truly is an amalgamation of so much work and learning from the many different paths that I have taken in my past / that I have gone down.

I’m ready to take these next steps and see how the rest of the journey continues to unfold.