From Pharmacy to Frontend Engineering: What Actually Translates

Why I’m switching

After having graduated from pharmacy school in 2023, and having had worked in various community pharmacies during college and up to 2024, I’ve had just enough to experience to know that community pharmacy might not be the best option for me at this point in time. Sure, it can be chill, low-stress, low-effort, and extremely rewarding at times, but I want there to be more to my life than sitting all day within four walls. My move into software came because the biggest opportunities I was weren’t clinical, they were systemic. Pharmacy generates high-quality data and depends on precise workflows, but a lot of value is trapped in disconnected tools and manual steps. I want to unlock that hidden value by building software that connects the domain knowledge of pharmacy with modern technologies.

Transferable skills that eased my transition

This journey started in late 2019 - in the early days of COVID, when I was a freshman. I have always been a nerd for beautifully designed software. I would meticulously observe design trends shifting every year across OSs and apps, from the iconic iOS 6 → 7 shift, to Google’s updated logo, and Facebook’s ever-changing UI. I did some freelance design gigs during before college, but I always felt bottle-necked by my inability to code. Building on existing knowledge of HTML and CSS, I took the opportunity to finally learn software engineering during lockdown when college paused. The plan was to create a platform that facilitates online prescription delivery with my brother, who’s also a pharmacist. We agreed to split the work such that I learn and work on the frontend, and he learns and works on the backend. We got rightfully overwhelmed by the sheer amount of technical work needed to come up with even a measly MVP. As naive as were back them, we didn’t want to share our unicorn idea with other developers so that it doesn’t get stolen. Needless to say, That startup died right there, within 2 months of ideation, but what remained, was my interest in diving deeper into web development. 

Pharmacy is a safety-critical environment with strict rules, edge cases, and real consequences. I enjoyed and challenged myself in making complex decisions reliably. The community pharmacy has taught me valuable lessons which unexpectedly map cleanly into the software developer’s workplace. Here are a few I can think of:

1. Workflow optimization techniques. For one, working in a high-pressure pharmacy while managing studies has taught me to develop my own version of workflow optimization techniques (think queue management, prioritization, and bottleneck reduction).
2. Quality, safety, and risk. Dealing with patients with polypharmacy and various other OTC cases has rewired my brain into default considering possible unhandled errors and edge cases, and adopting a double check mindset - which can roughly be compared to thoroughly reviewing my code before merging in a pull request or setting up observability before going live with a feature.
3. Communication and stakeholder management. Working in the pharmacy, I translated complex information about medications and pathologies to both patients and physicians. It has also exposed me to dealing with frustrated patients with empathy and gently de-escalating situations with customers.

What I learned + how I practiced (projects, routine, milestones)

I didn’t want another “two-months of ideation” story, so I started taking paid and sometimes underpaid gigs. I started Studio Valence, a design studio for startups in the Middle East. The ultimate goal was to bring designs on par with Silicon Valley’s hottest startups to their counterparts in the Middle East. I wore a bunch of different hats from marketing and business development to project management and software development. I did marketing two-days, and spent the rest of the week equally between work and learning. I worked by day, and learned by night. At that point, the smartest LLM available was GPT-3, and so whenever I faced a bug or a cryptic error, I had to actually dive deep into it and break it down into its first principles. This approach of iteratively taking on project after project and accomplishing them depth-wise, has empowered me to cover more breadth by learning on demand. The work mostly revolved around marketing websites, and so I found myself obsessing over the tiniest design details, tackling the obscurest performance issues, and learning about the newest data-fetching and rendering patterns. Over time, those gigs stacked up, and I realized I’d quietly built a portfolio of production sites for some of the biggest startups in the Middle East.

What’s next? (roles I’m targeting + what I’m building next )

Right now, I’m not trying to force a perfect narrative — I’m trying to be specific about what I actually enjoy building and where I can add real value. I’m aiming for frontend engineering or product management roles where product thinking and UX matter, and where I can keep working close to real users, not just routine tickets. I want to lock in on a novel AI product; unlocking value out of on-demand intelligence in a serendipitously powerful way.