About

I've been living inside computers since I was five.

I remember being very curious about our family Windows PC growing up. I would navigate through the Start Menu like a maze, and I enjoyed playing Microsoft Paint, Pinball, and Solitaire.

Over time I have realized something important about the many times I sat at a computer completely enamored. I realized that the source of my curiosity and persistence with using computers usually revolved around the mechanics of using them and how they work.

Microsoft Paint is a good example of what I mean. You see, after all those years of playing Paint as a child, you might think I managed to produce at least a few decent pieces of artwork. You would be wrong. All I ever managed to create in Paint were artistic abominations.

So what was I doing then? Well, I liked playing with the tools themselves more than I liked drawing pictures with them. I remember the spray paint and the paint bucket the most. I loved resizing the spray paint and just… spraying. I was very interested in how it randomly fills in pixels then eventually fills in perfectly. It's the same story with the paint bucket. Put two colors on the color picker. Right click to fill one color. Left click to fill the other. Do this over and over until everything is one color and everything is erased.

Fast forward to today. I am a software developer still driven by that same core insight I felt as a child but didn't have the words for: computers are incredibly powerful tools that are fun to use. They can enable us to do incredible things perfectly, instantly, and at scale.

Despite the power and ease of computers, it remains difficult to make something truly useful and impactful with them. I now work on software almost every single day trying to do that.