Ore is a software developer who codes by day and writes stories by night. She currently works at a tech company that focuses on providing tech for lawyers. In her spare time, she likes to host costume parties, play piano, read, write, and geek out with her husband.

When I was a kid, I remember telling my sister about this amazing book I’d just finished reading. I was always reading.
My immigrant father would cancel our cable on a whim.
“You kids are always glued to the screen. Enough of that.”

I vividly remember him unplugging the TV in the middle of an episode of Sailor Moon.
Devastating.

But that’s when I discovered a better show, one that existed entirely in my head. I could read under the covers where my parents couldn’t catch me. I’d hide a paperback behind a math textbook and pretend I was studying. I became addicted to stories: reading them, sharing them, making them up.

Anyway, back to that “amazing” book I was telling my sister about. It didn’t exist. I’d made up the characters and the adventure.
To my horror- she wanted to read it.

Shoot. I was caught. A liar.

But it turns out I wasn’t a liar. Worse, I was a writer.

Being a writer is kind of like being a crazy person. There’s an entire world inside your head.

“You can minor in English, but you have to major in something else.” My parents repeated this often.
I love them, but they have a completely different worldview. Of course they do—they immigrated in their thirties and had to start from scratch. Their concerns were practical: comfort, stability, a paycheck right after graduation.

I’ll never tell them, but they weren’t completely wrong.

“You’re in the starvation game, kids. Don’t quit your day job,” one of my creative writing professors at the University of Calgary told our class early on.

Besides, I told myself dramatically, the best writers didn’t learn at institutions, they just had the vibes.

I could’ve fought my parents on it. They’d have relented, eventually. But I’ve always been a pragmatist.
So, I enrolled into the bachelors of science program at U of C right after Grade 12. After all, my second-favorite subject after English was science. I’m not particularly street smart (I get lost in my own neighborhood, have forgotten my wallet on planes, trains, etc) but in highschool I had good grades.
I was decent at math, hated physics, and wanted to do something “cool”.
Healthcare was out because I hated “blood and guts”.
Engineering was out, too much physics.
International relations was out, my parents thought it didn’t have job security.
As I was debating what major to choose, I remembered a grade 9 field trip I’d taken for women in STEM. One of the activities was a circuit board craft, a light up heart you could add LEDs to by completing the circuit by smoldering it to the board. I loved that activity.
So, basically on a whim, and going off of those vibes, I chose computer science.

My first year was a mixed bag. “Decent at math” in high school didn’t translate to acing classes like Linear Algebra, Discrete Mathematics, or Algorithms and Data Structures. The big auditoriums where you could barely see the prof, let alone all of the faces in your class freaked me out:
I cried in the labs. Regularly.
I contemplated transferring to business. Often.
I genuinely wondered if I’d made the right choice.

The thing that kept me going my first year? Creative Writing.
In a sea of calculus and programming, I had one “fun” class: Creative Writing 1 – Short Stories.
It was technically a second-year course, and you needed a portfolio to get in, but I
submitted my portfolio anyway and used my AP English credit to argue my case.

The professor, yes, the same “don’t quit your day job” one, called me in before the term started. She wore red-rimmed glasses and looked into my soul, I wonder if she was trying to scare me off.

I was terrified.

But I took the class.

Eventually, computer science got easier. I found a great friend group, and we suffered through assignments together. Over time, it grew on me. In programming, there’s something called syntax. Much like in writing, code is a kind of story. One function talks to another. It has to flow. It has to be readable.

Luckily, I’ve always been a storyteller.

By third year, the theoretical gave way to the creative. I thrived. I learned web
development, how to make a site look and do cool things. I took an amazing course called Human-Computer Interaction where I built quirky projects: a hat that sprayed perfume when exposed to light, an arcade game written in low-level code. Grueling. Rewarding.

Code became my new medium.

Then I dipped my toe into the industry, taking a year-long internship at a health-tech startup. (And when I say startup, I mean startup. Half the developers worked from home, a rarity in 2018, and our “office” was a duplex.)

But I loved every minute of it. I was finally able to step away from the theory, and the algorithms, and just code, the way they do in the industry. “Move fast and break things”, the 2000’s approach to dev work, but very start-up. Perfect for a person like me, where I love to explore and learn.

I was flown to San Francisco, then Palm Springs, for offsites. (God knows why they brought the intern.) It felt surreal. Like I’d vibed my way into the sun. I’d girlbossed my way into tech.

That startup’s gone now, their burn rate was wild (maybe don’t fly your intern to California twice), but I’m grateful. That experience got me hooked on software development, and it gave me the confidence to know I had what it took to survive in the industry. And also, I met my husband there! He was an intern too.

Now, with AI taking the industry by storm, there’s this new trend: vibe coding.

The idea? Open GPT-4 (or your model of choice), start prompting, follow the flow, and see what you get. It’s quite chaotic. LLMs hallucinate all the time. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you kind of know what you’re doing.

But honestly? As I write this, I realize: I never really knew what I was doing.
In a way, I’ve been vibe coding through life.
And I love my life.

These days, I’m still a writer and a coder. I work from home for a legal-tech company. And yeah, adulthood makes it hard to balance hobbies, bills, and obligations. But I try.
I love my “day job” because it’s creative and stimulating. Funny enough most people don’t think of coding as “creative” but it’s solving a problem, in a way you don’t know how to – yet. It’s literally creating something.

I love the flexibility of working from home, and being able to work remotely. Last year Mitchell – my husband – and I worked from Paris for a month. It was amazing, we went to boulangeries in the morning, the Louvre in the afternoon, and worked evenings. What more could a girl ask for!

Still- once a month, I really get back to my roots. I host a writers’ circle with friends from my English classes. We all took different paths. Some of them are teachers, some of them technical writers, some in the middle of their PHD’s. We critique each other’s essays, poems, and novels (I’m writing one of those eventually). On these evenings, I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do.
Maybe not in the way I imagined, but I got there.

By vibes.