About

Self-Taught, On Purpose

I'm mostly self-taught. I have a UX design certification and some computer engineering coursework, but most of what's on this site came from building something real, watching it break, and finding out why - not from working through a syllabus in order. I think that's a feature. Nobody assigned me the boring half of the stack, so I went deep on whatever the current problem actually needed: RLS one week, EAS build config the next, an OTP supervision tree because Dredge demanded it. That path takes longer to look tidy on paper and shorter to actually be useful in production. I'd rather show you the case studies than a transcript.

Why Tech?

I like systems big enough to break, because the break is the interesting part. When something fails my first move isn't to patch it, it's to find which assumption I made that the system never shared. Most of my case studies have a 'What I Learned' section that's really that same story: a default that should have been NULL, a fallback that hid a dead feature, a guard that couldn't tell a renewal from a duplicate. I keep the lesson and make the boundary explicit next time.

Why UX?

I do my own UX research and design because I've caught myself shipping technically-correct things nobody wanted to use. Research before code means I build what the problem needs, not what seemed obvious in the kickoff call. And doing both halves means no translation layer - the person who designed the interaction is the one writing the component, so what ships is what was designed.

"You have never once encountered a feature you didn't want to document."

Feature gremlin. I build the thing, test the thing, document the thing, and six months later find I've created feature archaeology.

How I Work

• →I move fast without cutting corners - the Bluumo build was 12 weeks solo for 181k lines, and it passed an independent security audit.
• →I do UX research before writing code, so I build what users actually need, not what seemed obvious upfront.
• →I bridge design and engineering fluently - no translation layer required.
• →I default to active listening over assumption, especially with clients and stakeholders.
• →I write accessible code from the start (WCAG AA) rather than retrofitting it.

Outside the Editor

When I'm not building, I'm usually at the gaming table - tabletop RPGs and board games are a big part of my life (and the reason Dice Cat and Coyotes and Candles exist). I also do fiber arts, painting, woodworking, and chainmail.