Got laid off in 2017 and never got a real job again. (I have a UX background) 1. I immediately went to Spain to do the Camino de Santiago. Was learning buildin

Got laid off in 2017 and never got a real job again. (I have a UX background) 1. I immediately went to Spain to do the Camino de Santiago. Was learning building web apps (Meteor) and launchd a full landing page / swing dance registration site while on the Camino. 2. Learned React and a few other tools after that, tried to be a consultant for a year. Then tried to launch a bunch of projects ("startups" if you wanted to be generous with that term) 3. Met my partner (and now cofounder) at a swing dance, who showed me microbiology and "the potential of phage therapy" because doctors weren't getting access to it 4. I created a random side project connecting docs with phage labs with her (now six years ago). We started connecting docs and labs, and have since taken on 40+ cases, and successfully treated two. Last year we moved to Sydney to essentially run a translational microbiology lab / phage therapy clinical trial — she's the microbiologist and I'm the research software engineer. We're just treating our 4th patient now. I'm building data collection tools for our bioinformaticians, doctors/nurses and microbiology lab, and trying to scale this project up using automation tools and robots. We're creating reports for the TGA to make sure our preps are safe. There's lots of work in areas I've never deal with (data science, stats, building full stack web apps, dealing with OpenTrons, REDCap, and a billion other tools). It doesn't pay nearly as much as tech, but it's the most absurd thing I could ever do as a "UX designer"