The long way round.

The eleven years

I enrolled at McMaster in Software Engineering & Management in the autumn of 2014 and graduated in November 2025. In between I took more than one leave of absence and came back each time. I'm not going to dress that up as a plan — it wasn't one. But I finished the degree I started, on the harder version of the route.

I've decided to state the timeline rather than let it sit as an unexplained gap, because the silence is what makes it look like something it isn't. If you want to ask about it in an interview, ask.

What I did in the gaps

I worked the whole way through. From September 2014 — the month I enrolled — until March 2020 I ran the books for my family's business as its bookkeeper and office administrator. Reconciling financial records, handling client support and customer relationships. Five and a half years of it, alongside coursework.

In the summer of 2019 I took a contract as operations manager at Benchmark Sports, preparing financial statements and building projection-based growth models in Excel. A couple of months on the assembly line at FCA in 2016 before that.

Then the recent stretch: a summer of inventory replenishment and cycle counts at Costco in 2021. The summer of 2022 at Fortel Express, a trucking company, keying freight documents — bills of lading, load numbers, driver logs — into systems with no shared identifier between them, then working out which record was wrong when they disagreed. And in early 2023, a four-month software engineering internship at Bulk Buys, where I finally got to be on the other side of it — automating a daily re-entry task instead of performing one.

What it changes about how I work

Four things I don't think I'd have otherwise:

• I know what a manual process costs before I automate it. The $6K a year I saved at Bulk Buys wasn't a clever algorithm — it was recognising a daily re-entry task as an integration and pricing what it was costing the team.
• I'm wary of unattended automation. Years of reconciling records that systems had confidently written wrong will do that. It's why ApplyTron won't send a document without a person approving it, even though that caps its throughput.
• I model the domain before the schema. FreightSwipe's design — one authoritative load record instead of two copies — comes directly from having been the person reconciling the two copies.
• I know how to come back to something that has gone badly. Restarting the same degree more than once isn't a line I'd have chosen for a resume. It did teach me that the interesting part of any project is what happens after the first plan fails, which is most of engineering.