Hi, I'm Hande.

At 18, my family handed me a life plan: become a doctor or dentist. I picked dentist. How bad could teeth be?

Reader, teeth are bad.

Not the teeth themselves, the job. Same chair, same drill, same "open wide" every day. And you don't just fix teeth, you perform. Patient one wants brutal honesty. Patient two is terrified. Patient three wants a 45-minute lecture on their cavity. You become a different person for each one, sometimes all before lunch. By 5pm I had no idea who I was anymore.

So I hid in academia. A PhD in Endodontics. Root canals, but make it research. The problem? Dental healthcare moves at a glacial pace, we were still having passionate debates about which toothpaste is best, while in tech something new drops every week and you're already behind if you took a long weekend.

I did find one thing I loved: data analysis. Breaking models, fixing them, making numbers make sense. That felt suspiciously fun.

Eventually the thought arrived: what if I just did that? Without the teeth?

Some online courses later, enrolled in fullstack .NET, traded the drill for a keyboard, and replaced "open wide" with "it works on my machine."

Zero regrets. The teeth can find someone else.