About

From kitchens to code

I started out in professional kitchens. I trained as a cook in bistronomy and worked in it for a few years. It taught me to work under pressure, keep a clean and organised station, and hold the same standard shift after shift. A different world from software, but the discipline carried over.

Finding the technical side

My pull toward technical work came through SEO. Over nearly three years I taught myself the craft from scratch: keyword research, content strategy, technical site audits, and Search Console, one search at a time. It was the first work where I thought analytically with tools and data, and where I caught myself automating the repetitive parts of my day. That habit of building small tools to make my own life easier is what led me into programming. Alongside it I did some freelance web design, building client sites with WordPress and Elementor and dropping into a little HTML and CSS when a page needed something custom, which was another nudge toward wanting to understand the code underneath.

All in at 42 Tokyo

In 2023 I moved to Japan and enrolled at 42 Tokyo, a tuition-free school with no teachers and no lectures. You learn by working through a series of projects, each harder than the last, reading documentation, testing ideas, and figuring things out with the other students. It is demanding and entirely self-directed, which suited me. I have always learned best by building something and taking it apart when it breaks.

Over about two years I completed the common core. Plenty of it did not come easily, and I spent real time stuck on problems before they clicked, but I kept at it and came out a much stronger engineer than I went in. What I value most is not any one project but a way of working: take an unfamiliar problem, break it into pieces, and stay with it until it makes sense.

What I build

I work in C and C++, close to the machine. I enjoy systems programming, desktop applications in Qt, and graphics written from scratch. Most of my projects started as things I simply wanted to exist: a raycasting engine, a movie tracker that replaced a messy text file, a budgeting app built around the Japanese kakeibo method, a screen-streaming tool with its own small protocol. I build each one end to end and on my own, which is how I learn best and why I can stand behind all of it.

I am in Tokyo for the long term. I hold a spouse visa, so I can take any full-time role without sponsorship, and I am looking for my first job as a software engineer, ideally in systems, C++, or backend work where I can go deep and keep learning.