I've always had an eye before I had a title for it.

In the early 2000s, I was selected for a city-funded arts project and helped build a DVD that premiered at the Bellevue Art Museum, recognized by the Mayor of Kent. I hadn't taken a single art class yet. That came that fall, at Green River through Running Start, in the same stretch of years I graduated from college one day before I graduated high school.

That instinct for making things, clear, considered, worth looking at, is the same instinct that, years later, would click into place the moment I sat in on a user research study at F5 Networks. I was working as a web developer at the time, watching someone struggle through a task I'd helped build. Something clicked. It wasn't just "this is broken." It was the realization that understanding why something is broken is its own discipline, and it was the one I actually wanted to practice.

But that clarity came after a fairly winding road to get there.

At 25, after leading an arts co-op with international artists in Taipei, I took a ferry to Xiamen in mainland China, then a two-day train ride to Shanghai, where I interned at a government-run art museum, translating materials in the education department and, at one point, leading a tour for expats. I applied to grad school from there. The applications were rejected, not for merit, but because my identity was stolen and the payments never went through. I moved back to the U.S. dejected, into a recession-era job market that meant years in customer service before I found my way into tech.

I started in development. It was there, building things, then later watching that research study at F5, that I realized art school not working out didn't mean design wasn't mine to have. I found my footing at the intersection of engineering, customer experience, and craft: not choosing between the analytical and the artistic, but building a career at the place where they overlap.