How I got here
The first interfaces I ever redesigned were the menus of gadgets I hated using. I'd take them apart, decide the software was the broken part, and sketch better screens nobody was ever going to build. Twenty years later that's still the job, except now the screens ship.
That instinct pulled me toward the least glamorous, most interesting corner of design: the software that runs critical infrastructure. Data center operations, financial planning platforms, operator consoles. The tools that keep large technical systems alive. At Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta I designed for environments where a confusing interface isn't an annoyance, it's an outage. That constraint is exactly what I love.
Somewhere along the way I stopped handing off specs and started shipping them. I work in the codebase alongside engineers, using AI-assisted workflows to design and build at the same time. I encoded our design system as enforceable rules so AI-generated features ship consistent and accessible without waiting on me to review every change. The habit stuck because once a design is running, you can't fool yourself about whether it works.
I live in Los Angeles. Most of my actual thinking happens away from the desk, longboarding along the coast or sitting with a coffee somewhere before the city wakes up. It took me an embarrassingly long time to stop treating that as procrastination.