About

I was the kid who couldn't stop taking things apart to see how they worked, and then putting them back together slightly incorrectly. I've basically been doing that ever since — just with more microcontrollers and better soldering.

What I didn't expect is how much of this is really about people. Some of my favorite engineering memories are staying up until 2am debugging something with a teammate, both of us fully convinced we'd found the bug several times before we actually did. That's the good stuff.

The Modulin

At some point I ran out of instruments to learn, so I decided to build one. The Modulin is a digital synthesizer and MIDI controller in a violin form factor, assembled almost entirely from salvaged parts over 18 months. It was a ridiculous project that kept getting more interesting.

The best part was opening it up: I started inviting newer EE students to build alongside me, and watching someone play an instrument they helped wire together for the first time is genuinely one of the highlights of my time at Stanford. It eventually got invited to perform alongside musicians from the San Francisco Symphony, which still catches me off guard when I say it out loud.

Self-hosting

I run my own Jellyfin media server, use Syncthing to replicate photos to an old Pixel sitting in a drawer, and generally prefer understanding the full stack when I can. It's part curiosity, part stubbornness, and honestly a great excuse to learn how things actually work — from disk to interface — rather than trusting a black box.

(Also: it gives me an excuse to keep building the home network.)

Radio

I got my Amateur Radio license mostly out of curiosity, and it has paid off in wildly disproportionate ways. With a cheap software-defined radio dongle, I've listened in on Air Traffic Control at SFO, decoded my own car key fob, and pulled live aircraft tail numbers from planes flying overhead. There's something refreshing about RF — the signals don't care what you think they should do. The physics are the physics.

What I'm looking for

I'm happiest when I'm building things where the constraints are real and the solutions have to be clever — hardware meets software, and the laws of physics get a vote. And I do my best work when the people around me are excited about what they're building too.

If that sounds like your team, get in touch.