Here's who I am...

Programming

Programming started, for me, with games. I loved open worlds — GTA V most of all — enough that in middle school I opened Unity to try building one of my own. That's when I learned the thing that has stayed with me: what I'd actually fallen for wasn't the game on screen, but the act underneath it — taking a principle or problem from the world, modeling it mathematically, and watching the model come alive inside a machine. That moment is the start of my life as a developer.

In college the fascination shifted from games to services — web and apps. There's a particular catharsis in seeing an idea become a working thing in days instead of months, and I chased it. I held onto that during military service, too: at a base 800 meters up a mountain, I taught myself Next.js, React, and Tailwind in the evening hours we were allowed online. The identity I was building, then, was the developer who turns a social problem into shipped software, fast.

By the time I was discharged, the world had changed. Generative AI had arrived, and the skill I had spent years sharpening — shipping fast — was no longer scarce. I started a frontend job with Claude open beside me, and the shift became impossible to ignore. For a while I doubted whether building, on its own, could still be a craft I could call mine.

Eventually I came back to the starting point. What I had loved as a kid wasn't shipping; it was abstraction — taking the world, restating it in math, then writing it into code. The thing in paragraph one. So I chose to live as a researcher. The shipping skill didn't disappear; it became the other hand of the same craft. Today I'm trying to be someone who abstracts the world through research and ships those results into UX-aware software, fast — with AI sitting between the two hands as a tool.