About

I got into software by accident...the original plan was to be a professional artist. While I was figuring out exactly how that was going to work, I got a job as a receptionist to pay the bills.

I was very quickly bored out of my mind and started tinkering with the company website just to have something to do. One thing led to another — night classes, tutorials, a lot of self-guided stumbling — and I fell in love with engineering as a discipline. I still paint but the craft of building software became a parallel passion -- although the two aren't as separate as they look: both are about exploration, discovery, and the specific satisfaction of bringing something into being that didn't exist before. They're also both just really hard, which I've come to understand is the point.

Every move in my career since has followed the same pattern: I get good enough at a scope of problem that it stops being hard enough, and I go looking for something bigger. That's taken me from New Relic to Brex to EMERGE to what's now Lyntris (by way of Hypergiant and Accelint — same company, two rebrands, one very confusing LinkedIn), with the scope and the responsibility growing each time.

What I care most about, though, isn't the technical scope — it's the team. Software is a team sport, and I think the whole team gets better together or fails together. I spend a lot of my time pairing, learning, mentoring, collaborating and making sure the people around me have what they need, and I treat communication as an engineering skill, not a soft one. A team that talks to each other well will outbuild a team of geniuses who don't, every time.

I also don't think I ever fully know what I'm doing — and I've stopped treating that as a problem. It's just what learning feels like from the inside, and it hasn't gone away no matter how senior I've gotten. If anything, that's the whole engine: the same restlessness that got me out of a receptionist job is still what makes me chase the next hard problem.

Which is what I'm looking for next: something genuinely hard, technically and organizationally, on a team that takes communication as seriously as it takes code. Title matters less to me than whether the work stretches me and the people are worth building alongside.