When I was 18 I made two decisions that changed my life: I learned how to code and traded my first stock. 

The code was PHP – and it was awful. The stock was MSFT – and I lost money. But I was hooked. For the next 10 years, I followed the conventional wisdom and double majored in finance and economics and got a master’s degree in quant finance. 

But it wasn’t enough. So I taught myself Python and used it to trade stocks, futures and options, become a risk quant, and build quant engineering teams. 

20 years after that first line of code, I build data systems at AWS and create digital products for beginners getting started with Python for quant finance.