Engineering is how I build, but design is often where I lose track of time.
STORY
I’ve always been pretty good at getting oriented.
I grew up moving around a lot and graduated high school in Alaska before heading to Arizona to study Applied Computing and Communications.
The combination was intentional. I loved technology, but I was just as interested in the people using it. I wanted to understand both sides: how something works and how you make it make sense to someone else.
That’s still a pretty good description of what I’m drawn to today.
WHY OVER WHAT
I like figuring out why something isn’t working.
I’m rarely satisfied being handed a solution and told to build it. I want to understand why the problem exists in the first place.
Sometimes the answer is a better interface. Sometimes it’s a technical change. Sometimes it’s realizing that the process itself has accumulated a bunch of unnecessary wrinkles.
I like ironing those out.
That’s also why I care about momentum. You can plan a feature forever, but building it teaches you things a planning doc can’t. Once something is real enough to click around, the problem starts to look different. I’d rather get there, learn from it, and keep shaping the solution.
ON CRAFT
The designer hat is my favorite one.
I love thinking through the tiny things that make software feel good: the interaction you don’t have to think about, the shortcut that saves a few seconds every time, the layout that suddenly makes a complicated idea obvious.
That instinct extends to how I work, too. I’m usually looking for the friction—repetitive handoffs, annoying processes, work that a person probably shouldn’t have to keep doing manually—and figuring out how to make it smoother.
The latest AI tools have made that instinct even easier to act on—I can just go build the fix instead of only planning it.
THE NON-WORK VERSION
Outside the laptop
These days, home is Colorado, which is a pretty convenient place to collect Rocky Mountain hobbies.
I ski. I hike. I climb. I garden. I love a good board game, and I’m an extrovert who’s happiest when there are people around my table for dinner.
There’s probably a common thread in there somewhere. I like making things, tending to things, solving things, and sharing them with other people.
Turns out that applies pretty well to software, too.