About Me

The first machine I ever reverse-engineered was a cheap DVD player my family owned when I was nine. I watched my dad curse at it for an afternoon before I pulled the back panel off with a butter knife, traced the ribbon cable to a dislodged pin, and clicked it back into place. The picture came on. Nobody applauded — my dad just laughed and handed me the remote. But the feeling of that moment never left me: there is always a small, specific thing that is broken, and if you look closely enough, you can find it.

I spent most of my early teenage years looking closely at things that weren't mine to look at — old laptops pulled from curbs, busted routers from the neighborhood recycling bin, a printer that I turned into a desk lamp before my mom made me put it back. I wasn't a prodigy. I was stubborn. The internet taught me everything — forum posts from 2006, half-translated YouTube tutorials, the kind of wikis that still use frames. I liked that nobody was grading me, and that the things I built either worked or didn't. The feedback was instant. I still trust that kind more than any other.

Code stopped being a hobby and started being a craft sophomore year of high school. I was helping a family friend manage intake for a small cleaning business. She had a paper log, a shared Google Sheet, and a phone that never stopped ringing. I wrote her a clumsy little Python script that pulled from the sheet, sorted jobs by zip code, and printed a route. It saved her maybe twenty minutes a day. She cried a little when I showed her. I went home and stayed up until 3am building the next version. That was the hinge. Before that script, code was a puzzle. After, it was a lever. A way to move something heavy off somebody's back.

Teaching kids came into my life the same year, almost by accident. I started tutoring a seventh-grader named Micah on Scratch, then Python. His first program was a text adventure where the only enemy was a goose. Watching him debug his own code (that quiet panic, then the fist-pump when the goose finally attacked on turn three) I realized teaching and engineering are the same job. You hold a big messy system in your head, and your job is to hand somebody else a way in. Six years later I still teach twice a week, and I still steal explanations from eight-year-olds. They're the only people I've met who explain recursion without making it boring.

Teaching ended up pointing me straight at UW Informatics. The iSchool treats software as a conversation between data, design, and the person at the other end of the screen, which matches how I already thought about it. A product is good when somebody's Tuesday gets easier. I picked the Data Science track so I could read the patterns inside the systems I build — when a model earns its keep, and when a SQL join would have been faster and cleaner.

Senior spring, I'm still chasing the thing I was chasing at nine with a butter knife. Find the specific piece that's broken and fix it in a way the person using it doesn't have to think about. That's FixFlow, so a repair shop stops losing jobs to a voicemail nobody checked. That's Field Alpha, where the feedback loop is a technician telling me at 9am which of yesterday's changes ruined his morning. That's Go Macro, where we're trying to answer one question well instead of thirty badly. When I'm not at a keyboard I'm walking Seattle end to end, teaching, or arguing with a friend about typography. It's all the same work.

Looking for a summer 2026 SWE internship. Systems, full-stack, or applied ML. If that sounds like your team, reach out.