I was three the first time I touched a keyboard. My parents joke I figured out the mouse before the alphabet, and they're not really joking. Other kids built forts. I sat in front of a humming CRT and watched a screen come alive when I clicked things.

The internet, back then, felt like a gift nobody had checked the price on. Strangers built websites in their bedrooms and put them up for free. People answered questions on forums at 2am because they felt like it. None of them knew me. They didn't have to. They built things anyway, and a kid in India was watching.

This page is the thank-you note I never sent.

Engineering first, then craft

I started a BTech in Electronics and Communication thinking I'd be a normal CS guy. Build the systems, ship the systems, let somebody else worry about the user. First year, they had us welding sheet metal in a workshop with leather aprons and helmets that fogged up. I wasn't bad at it. I just couldn't see myself doing it for life.

The pandemic broke the rest of the routine. Two years off campus, nothing to do but stare at apps. I started noticing which ones I kept opening and which ones I deleted by lunch. The difference wasn't the engineering. Somebody, somewhere, had decided the person on the other side mattered. I just didn't have a word for that somebody yet.

The unglamorous middle

So I went looking. I signed up for UserTesting and uTest and spent the next year as a test subject. 100+ moderated and unmoderated sessions, watching strangers' apps and filing reports, until I hit Silver on uTest. The pay was bad. The lessons were not.

That's where I found the words for what I wanted to do. Product design. UX. The titles I'd been circling without knowing.

The hustle bought me my first design seat at an early-stage startup called Helpy Moto. After that, a year at HCLTech as a product designer. Then Sydney, for a Master of Interaction Design at UTS. No regrets, not even the rent.

A designer who builds

These days I design products and then build them. Mostly Swift and SwiftUI. Lumo and Bokeh both started as Figma frames and ended up on my phone, which is the only honest QA. Designing something I knew I'd have to build later changed how I designed. Less "wouldn't it be cool if". More "what would I forgive myself for shipping at 1am".

I do designathons for the same reason. 48 hours, a real brief, no exit but the ship button. SUEDE, Apple Foundation Program, UTS Startups.

Weekends I work the floor at Pasta e Basta, a stall in one of Sydney's busiest food markets. A year and change in. Just promoted to team lead. The closest thing to paid ethnography I will ever get.

When I'm not at a laptop or behind a counter I'm at a climbing gym, bouldering, very averagely.

The work I'm proudest of looks easy because it isn't. I learned that from the strangers.