I've been building things on the internet since the days of dial up.
In the late 90s that meant HTML fan sites for my favorite shows from Toonami and Adult Swim, paired with a love for building custom Starcraft campaign maps. Nobody told me that was programming, hell I'd have told you that it wasn'. I just saw a world where I could build things.
That same curiosity and drive is what gets me out of bed and onto my laptop everyday.
I'm a Senior Frontend Engineer with 7+ years of professional experience and an obsession with two things: complex UIs that actually work for the user, and state systems that don't fall apart when you push on them. I've spent a significant part of my career on two connected problems: building state systems that are predictable, testable, and maintainable using XState, Redux, and React Context, and architecting component libraries that other engineers can build on top of with confidence. I love helping others with my work. Not because it's impressive, but because getting it right for each new situation is a fresh new challenge and deeply satisfying.
On the UI side I sweat the details: performance, accessibility, the pixel-perfect implementation that respects both the design and the person using it. I'm the kind of engineer who notices when something is slightly off and can't leave it alone.
I became a professional engineer in 2018 after spending my earlier career in real estate, but I was always the tech person at every job, maintaining websites and servers since 2008. The career change wasn't really a change so much as finally making official what I'd been doing anyway.
I also care deeply about giving back. I've mentored engineers who went on to ship real features and build real careers, and that means as much, if not more to me than any technical problem I've tackled.