How about this one? When I was working on my idle cycle harvester I happened to sit near Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. I got invited to have coffee with them many mornings. I told them how I thought Google could contribute to managing genome data, and a few weeks later, they opened up a chat window and said "We wrote a mapreduce to compress DNA. Can you tell us if this is helpful?" and that's how Google Cloud Genomics was born.
yes, my training is in biology and it came about because I thought that biology would be more interesting to hack than computers (all this happened when I was in middle school and high school, hacking on the internet and taking biology classes). It's like being put in front of a magical new computer and being told "we have this thing in the lab, we don't know how it works, so can you sort of play with it and tell us how?"
But I also know computers quite well and so my career evolved to be "research engineer" rather than "scientist" or "software engineer".
