I didn't study computer science. I studied English - creative writing, Romantic poetry, linguistics. I graduated with a head full of Blake and a vague plan to figure the rest out later.
The rest turned out to be software engineering. A very small ad agency took a chance on me, handed me a pile of PHP, HTML, CSS, and jQuery, and said good luck. I taught myself everything. Late nights, bad Stack Overflow answers, a lot of breaking things and fixing them. That's still how I learn.
I've never been ashamed of that origin story. If anything, I think it made me better. Engineers who came up through CS programs learned to think like computers. I learned to think like a reader - like someone who needs to understand something quickly, feel something, be moved to act. That turns out to be pretty useful when you're building interfaces.
Amazon, and the end of imposter syndrome
Seven years at Amazon. I was a founding member of the Meridian design system team - one of the best things I've ever worked on. Building the foundation that hundreds of teams ship on top of is a different kind of engineering. You're not building features. You're building trust. You're building constraints that feel like freedom.
Amazon is also where I finally stopped feeling like a fraud. Not because someone told me I belonged - but because I just kept shipping, kept solving hard problems, kept being in rooms with brilliant people and holding my own. Seven years of that will do it.
The thing about winning a CLIO
In 2015 I helped build the LA Dodgers Digital Trading Room - a real-time web application running on a 10,000px-wide Chrome instance, visualizing live data during the MLB trade deadline. Every tech person we talked to said it couldn't be done, at least not as a web app. We did it anyway. Then we won a CLIO Award for it.
That was the first time I understood what validation actually feels like. Not the imposter-syndrome-relief kind - the real kind, where you did something genuinely hard and it got recognized. I think about that project whenever someone tells me the web can't do something.
Why accessibility
Because it's a justice issue, and I don't know how to care about justice selectively. Too many engineers treat accessibility as a compliance checkbox - something you bolt on at the end when legal gets nervous. I think that's exactly backwards. Accessible code is better code. Accessible design is better design. And the web is a public space; everyone deserves to move through it with dignity.
That's not a philosophy I arrived at in the abstract. It came from years of watching real people struggle with real interfaces that engineers just didn't think about. I think about them now.
The rest of it
I have a tattoo sleeve of Bill Murray portraits. I dye my hair. I am extremely online. I'm odd, queer, and try very hard to make the spaces I'm in more inclusive than I found them.
I believe kindness and high standards aren't in conflict. I believe the best work happens when people feel safe enough to say "I don't know." I believe the web is still one of the most interesting places to build things, fifteen years in.
Also — if you're the kind of person who opens DevTools before you read the copy, there might be something here for you.
If any of that sounds like someone you want on your team — let's talk.