Ben (Taehoon) Lim

Get to know Ben (Taehoon) Lim

What are you looking for in your next role?

For my next role, I am looking for a full-stack position. I am looking forward to work at a place that has good learning environment with mentorship.

Why did you decide to change career and/or educational paths? What was your prior path and how did you end up down that road initially?

Before this journey, I worked as a pharmacist at a hospital in Boston. I got my bachelors in pharmacy studies and went on to receive my doctorate in pharmacy afterwards. While working in the field, I noticed many areas where programming could help tremendously in patient care. Take medication reminders as an instance. Transplant patients often take over 20 different medications over a week and it would be a lot easier for them to have a program that reminded them of their schedule. This was my first encounter with programming. I worked on an Alexa Skill kit that would remind patients of their regimen and also answer some basic medication questions about the meds they are taking. Furthermore, there are a lot of uncertainties and confounding factors in the field of medicine. Some of the uncertainties can include why treatments didn't work as expected or why drugs acts differently for some people or how someone contracted a disease. But, for programming, there always is a clear reason why something is not working if you dig deep enough. Computers are logical. And, I love logic! Lastly, programming fulfills my desire for craftsmanship. I firmly believe that the joy in life is in making the world a better place and impacting a positive change. The best way to do that is to CREATE something and programming is a wonderful tool for that.

Where have you been involved in the tech community (events attended, volunteer activities, etc.)?

I’d like to attend events with Machine Learning for Absolute Beginners, and find Java and Python meetups to help build on my programming knowledge. I’m interested in mentorship opportunities, and am particularly interested in volunteering with Resilient Coders.

What has been the most fulfilling aspect of your journey towards becoming a web developer? What's been your biggest challenge and how have you overcome it?

The one thing I absolutely love about programming is its efficiency in problem solving. There is always a smarter way to program and there are endless resources that make that possible. I believe that it is the quality where intelligent programmers can show their true strength. So, the most fulfilling moments during my journey towards becoming a web developer are when I figured out ways to improve my code or make it DRYer. My biggest technical challenge is that I enjoy tackling problems on my own and that often involves going down the rabbit hole. Although solving problems on my own is very rewarding and is a great learning experience, I have learned to seek out help from experienced engineers or peers when I spend too much time on one problem. I learned that delegating tasks and asking the right people is a valuable skill set in a real work environment.

If you had an unlimited budget and resources, what would you build?

I would build an AI driven healthcare system where everyone can get access to healthcare for free. There are so many people in the world who die and suffer because they can't get healthcare a lot of times due to cost. The program would need to be AI driven because it would nearly be impossible to make healthcare free when it is an industry that inherently requires enormous manpower. This will involve a drastic leap in science first to create an AI trustworthy enough to handle human lives.