You found the “secret” page about me

Apprarently you wanted to learn more, or just couldn’t help clicking the panda 🐼.

In any case you’re here! This page is partly space for me to share who I am, what I care about and partially a way to own being vulnerable.

If you stick around, thanks for taking the time to get to know me a bit better.

Why the Panda?

If you’ve met me I tend to also use far more analogies than necessarily, many times panda themed for unclear reasons. I also like easter-eggs and try and add them to whatever I work on, so I figured I might do something similar on the site.

Personal Life

I was born in Bangkok, Thailand and lived in a small town on the border of Cambodia (Aranyaprathet) for the first 6 years of life while my parents worked with Cambodian refugees during the Khmer Rouge crisis. We then moved to Vietnam, Romania, and India where I finished high school in Bangalore. I went on to volunteer in El Salvador for a year, finish undergrad at UBC in Vancouver, moved to Washington DC and, I now live in Denver with my son Calvin, daughter June and wife Taylor. I continued to visit my parents during their subsequent postings to Kyrgyzstan, Laos and finally North Korea. They finally retired to Sidney, Canada.

I love the outdoors and moved to Denver to mostly be closer to the mountains and nature. I enjoy traveling as a humbling way to see the variety of ways that humanity chooses to live life and remember that my world view is very much one of many.

Professional Life

I first realized my passion for technology when as a kid living in Vietnam I discovered that a benevolent computer vendor had installed a ninja game on our first computer, which I happened to find after combing through the entire directory, opening random files on the computer in DOS. The awesomeness of that game blew my mind. I didn’t know it then, but that moment of wonder would drive much of my career.

Until my early 20s, it was a love of gaming that drove me to keep learning. I first figured out how to network so that I could play LAN games with my brother - GTA2, Counterstrike, and the like. I started building our computers myself and my brother pulled me down the rabbit hole of overclocking them. I decided that getting a whitebook laptop would be a good idea and enjoyed ripping it apart to put in my own CPU / RAM etc. While living in Chennai as a teenager, I was on a first name basis with a number of vendors in the local computer market, Richie street.

With the successes and fun, came some missteps. I remember being pretty sure that the iPhone wasn’t going to make it and opted instead for the HTC TyTN, deciding that spending hours of my life modding the ROM would be fruitful. I eventually accepted I was wrong and got an iPhone a year or two later when I couldn’t deal with using the Internet through the travesty that was Windows Mobile 6. I’ve since worked with SQL, VBA (never again), Drupal (never again), Wordpress, PHP, Ruby & Rails, Vue, some React and Elixir, as well as all the other fun inbetween things you do to build technology (i.e. CI/CD, devops, etc).

Beyond tech, I love teaching & facilitating. In my college days, I taught English in El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan, and China. I found helping others learn a new skill rewarding. I still try and teach where I can and a lot of my previous work involved facilitating large workshops and designing online and in-person training using adult learning theory.

Combining my passion for tech with my facilitation skills is probably where I do my best work. It’s allowed me to build tools that support others in achieving their goals. I try to focus on using tools that meet the needs of what people are trying to achieve vs. over-engineering things for the sake of building shiny objects or dogmatically sticking to a given language or framework because it’s what I know.

Much of my career has been in International Development - it’s a part of my DNA (even before my parents, my family lived abroad for close to 200 years in India and Iran). But it’s also an industry, for its many flaws, that I believe is at least aspiring to do good in the world and I’ve enjoyed trying to be part of that goal.

Because tech was something I was naturally drawn to and learned through experience, my education focused other areas I wanted to explore - business and organization development. I had also found that so much of what made the technology succeed or fail depended on people more so than the merit of the code. So, I studied how to get people to work together, adopt ideas, manage change, and all the things that could keep me and the tools I built from succeeding.

Recently I’ve mostly focused on building internal infrastructure in Big Tech, which has been its own fascinating deep dive. I’ve enjoyed the people and the anthropological insights I’ve gained while developing some exciting tooling.

In sum, I’m proud of the skillset I’ve built - from facilitating large workshops, digging back into the code, selling, managing a backlog, and figuring out to navigate the ups and downs that come with trying to take businesses from an idea to a reality. I’m happiest when I can dive deep into a problem with a team that I can help foster the kind of “its about the process, not output” ethos that I’ve come to find important in life.