Electrical engineering degree, automation work in heavy manufacturing, building automation at a biomedical research institution, and ongoing Maine client engagements.
Half of what I build for the ZAO and for Maine clients is automation - cron jobs, agents, integrations, pipelines. The engineering background is where the instinct for that comes from. Pre-ZAO I shipped industrial automation; on the ZAO side I ship software automation; for Maine clients I ship whatever automation the operation actually needs.
That's the throughline from engineer to FOSS builder: same instinct for systems, now pointed at free & open source software shipped in public. Today that looks like 130+ open-source repos under github.com/bettercallzaal - the ZAO ecosystem, MIT-licensed and forkable wherever the code is mine.