From Matlab to Marketplace
In 2022, I could not write a line of code beyond Matlab. I was a mechanical engineer who designed C-arm robots at Siemens and modeled corrosion at Ohio State.
Then I decided to build something. Not for a class. Not for a company. For a problem I lived every day: being an international student with no network, sending messages into the void, never hearing back.
I taught myself React. Then Python. Then FastAPI. Then PostgreSQL. Then TypeScript. Then LLM APIs. Then Docker. Then AWS. Not from a bootcamp. From documentation, from building, from breaking things at 2am and fixing them by 4am.
Three months later, Alma was live. Mentors from Harvard, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Yale, and 20 more universities. Every line of code, every deployment, every design decision: mine. I went from zero to a live AI marketplace, solo.

