Who I am, and the long way I got here

Hey, I’m Sami. I’m 29, based in France (Canadian citizen too, which matters later), and right now I’m a computer science engineering student at ECE Paris, majoring in Data & AI. If 29 sounds a little late to be doing an engineering degree, well, that’s kind of the whole story. I took the scenic route, and I’m genuinely glad I did.

I didn’t start in code

I started in numbers. I did a bachelor’s in Mathematics & Economics, then a master’s in Digital Transformation at University Paris XII. On paper I was heading toward management, the kind of job where you talk about systems instead of building them.

And that’s pretty much what I did for a while. I spent two years as an IT project manager at EDF through an apprenticeship, leading an ITSM migration and moving a bunch of legacy stuff into ServiceNow. Big systems, lots of coordination. I was close to the tech, but always standing next to it rather than in it.

The job that flipped a switch

Then in late 2023 I took a permanent role as a business analyst at LCL. It lasted about eight months, and honestly? I didn’t enjoy it. But that turned out to be really useful information. The parts I actually liked were the ones where I got my hands dirty: automating SQL reporting, tuning a MongoDB cluster, building a little transaction lookup tool that made life easier for people in the branches.

The pattern was obvious once I saw it. I wanted to build the thing, not write documents about the thing.

Going all in

So I went back to school properly. I did a year at IPSSI while working as an apprentice at Ubisoft, building internal tooling. That’s where it really clicked. I shipped a Python web app wired into internal APIs that handled bulk operations across more than 1,300 IT services, and I automated a monthly reporting pipeline that cut a painful manual process down to almost nothing. First time the work felt like mine.

Then I made a deliberate call. I switched to ECE, an actual engineering school, because in France that gets you a real diplôme d’ingénieur instead of an RNCP title like the one at IPSSI. It cost me an extra year, and I’m completely at peace with that. I’d rather finish with the credential I actually want than save twelve months.

These days I’m doing that degree as an apprentice Data Engineer at Crédit Agricole Île-de-France. I get to work on real pipelines: I refactored a brutal 800 line dbt model that took half an hour to run and kept blowing up on memory into something modular that finishes in a couple of minutes. Studying and building at the same time is a lot, but it’s the rhythm that suits me.

Why this blog exists

I learn best when I have to explain things to myself. This is where I do that out loud. Notes on what I’m studying, stuff I build, problems I’m chewing on, and the occasional thing I got wrong. If it helps someone else taking a messy, non linear road into tech, even better. Glad you’re here.