FLIGHT RECORDER · CAREER TRAJECTORY

MY JOURNEY

A log of the trajectory — from taking video games apart to see how they worked, to building real-time worlds for a living. Every waypoint shaped the next.

▾ SCROLL TO BEGIN DESCENT

PRE — 1997

Origins

WAYPOINT 01 / 08

Before a single line of code, there was a decade and a half of exposure — computers in the house, video games that felt like worlds, and a few key people who pointed me toward the screen. I didn't know it yet, but the trajectory was already set.

CuriosityDOSLAN parties

1997 — 2002

Modding · Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

WAYPOINT 02 / 08

I started taking games apart to see how they worked — building mods and levels for Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. To share them I taught myself HTML, then quickly outgrew static pages and started building dynamic, server-side websites. Modding taught me systems; the web taught me to ship.

Level DesignScriptingHTMLServer-Side Web

2002 — 2005

Perl/CGI & Forum Software

WAYPOINT 03 / 08

Communities needed a place to live, so I built one. Custom forum software from the ground up — auth, threading, moderation, the works. This is where backend clicked: databases, sessions, performance, and the unglamorous discipline of running something real that people actually used.

CGIFlatFile DBApacheCustom CMS

2005 — 2012

Going Pro · Web Development

WAYPOINT 04 / 08

The hobby became a career. I moved into professional web development — and kept doing what I'd always done: building full-stack, front to back, owning the whole thing.

JavaScriptPHPSQLFull-Stack

2012 — 2017

iOS Apps

WAYPOINT 05 / 08

Mobile arrived and I followed it. Designing and shipping native iOS apps taught me a new kind of constraint — tight performance budgets, touch-first interaction, and the polish bar of the App Store.

Objective-CSwiftUIKitMobile

2017 — 2020

Virtual Reality

WAYPOINT 06 / 08

VR pulled me into 3D in earnest. Building immersive apps meant thinking in space, in frames-per-second, and in presence — get it wrong and people feel it in their stomach. This is where real-time rendering became the thing I cared about most.

Unreal EngineC++Spatial UXReal-Time

2018 — NOW

Full-Stack, At Scale

WAYPOINT 07 / 08

Back to the web — but bigger. Full-stack systems with real users and real load: modern frontends, distributed backends, and the DevOps to keep them alive. I'd never stopped building these; now I was architecting them.

TypeScriptReact.NETCloudDevOps

2022 — NOW

Senior Engineer & Game Dev

WAYPOINT 08 / 08

Everything converged. Real-time rendering, game development, and the engineering discipline of two decades — now aimed at golf-simulator software and high-performance 3D systems. Modding, the web, mobile, VR, full-stack: it all led here.

Unreal 5C++MultiplayerReal-Time 3D

▸ PRESENT DAY // YOU ARE HERE

Real-Time Rendering & Game Dev

These days I build golf-simulator software and real-time 3D systems — which is why this whole site is steered by what looks suspiciously like a golf ball.

VIEW THE ARCHIVE →