I’m Anish Patel. I live in Seattle, Washington, where I build stuff that I find cool.
I was 7 years old when I got my first computer, a Commodore C64. It quite literally changed my life. From the tape loading to the weird, awesome games, it was my most memorable ever Christmas gift. It was on this computer that I first got a taste of programming by playing about with a bit of BASIC.
I didn't really do much in the way of programming from this point till I got my first PC with a 56k modem years later. It was at this point that I first started making websites - inspired by the fledgling internet. I carefully hand crafted plain HTML websites using notepad and viewing the websites using Internet Explorer. Oh the good old days.
Fast forward a bunch of years and I'd stopped writing code entirely while the world kept advancing and improving around me. I came back to coding in my first job in 2008 learning C#, VBA and SQL. In short order, I'd built desktop apps, web apps, spreadsheet automations and console apps.
I worked in the space of Insurance and Banking for many years, learning many different technologies to the point where I now see myself as a language agnostic programmer. I have my favourites, but I work in any language and technology that the situation calls for. The bulk of my career has been running a technology consulting business where we would develop custom solutions for our clients to leverage analytical capabilities provided by my company.
Now, I work as a platform engineer, creating a multi cloud internal developer platform at Moodys Analytics. Doing this has taught me a great deal about how to scale developer productivity and achieve standardisation across a large development organisation.
In my spare time, I like to write code to sharpen my skills and work on my never ending homelab build out. I've accumulated enough tech in my house to run a small/medium business at home with enterprise class networking, CICD pipelines and the obligatory home automation and hosting services.