I build the things I didn't have.

I grew up without much access to any of this, and I didn't know it at the time. You can miss out on something and never find out it existed.

I got into computers in sixth grade. Building PCs, mostly. Nobody handed me that one, it was science class and working it out myself.

I didn't write code until I was sixteen, in AP Computer Science Principles. Python, and it was the first time I could make something instead of assembling it.

So the hardware came about four years before the software did. That is most of why I work at the low level.

Innovators for Purpose was the way in. That is the thing that actually jumpstarted me.

nobody sat me down and started any of this

It was the education. Not a computer and not a part, the education itself. I wish I'd had it younger.

So that is what I build now, for the people who are that age today.

Most of what I make now ends up with someone the market skipped.

Bridges between high level and low level language. How you get from something a person can read to something a machine can run, and what gets lost on the way.

It is the reason the same person wrote a processor from the instruction set and a block palette that middle schoolers use to drive a robot. Those are the same problem from opposite ends.

i would talk about this forever

Most of what I actually do is explaining. I lead a firmware subteam, I teach the shop assistants who run the trainings, and I teach middle schoolers who have never written a line. It is the same job at three altitudes: work out where someone actually is, and start there.

Running the subteam means goals set with people rather than for them, weekly meetings and 1:1s, and making sure nobody walks into a design review unprepared. Teaching is the same shape. Find what someone can already do, then hand them the smallest next step.

I ask before I build. The braille feature set came out of two rounds of user interviews, not out of what I thought would be interesting to make.

The site sorts everything into six. Here is what each one actually means, which is not always what it sounds like.

FIRMWARE

The layer where every other part of a device has to agree with the others. On Myo-Amp that is literally what it was: the firmware was the integration.

DIGITAL DESIGN

Reading a specification and turning it into logic a machine follows, one instruction at a time. No library underneath it.

IN THE SHOP

Mostly teaching, not running machines. Belt tension, thermistors, and someone who has never touched the thing in front of them.

SOFTWARE

Picking what the next person can maintain over what is elegant. The shop tool tracker runs on Power Automate for exactly that reason.

TEACHING

Handing over the thing I had to find sideways. Blocks that resolve down to real code, so a robot moves before anyone writes a line.

GAMES

Constraints, mostly. A Game Boy Advance has no operating system and nowhere to print to, so the tests ship as their own ROM.