How I Think About Building
I care a lot about how things look and how they feel to use. The interface is an integral part of the experience, not just a container for it. To me, good design isn't decoration; it's what makes someone want to stay, be curious, and explore. But I also believe that functionality and performance are just as important as aesthetics. I focus on the intersection of aesthetic intent and functional performance.
The Evolution
My path to software was paved through disciplines that rely on structure, perception, and rigorous practice:
- Artist & Draftsman: I've spent most of my life as a visual artist. Drawing and painting, then moved into digital art, motion graphics, and light VFX work. My background informs my development process. I approach engineering the same way I approach a canvas: I start with a rough sketch to organize the chaos, follow an impression, and refine until the composition and tone work, in this case, until the system works.
- Linguist: I worked as a Spanish interpreter for almost 20 years. It taught me to think about communication and clarity. In my UI work, I lean toward icons and visual cues over text-heavy interfaces. I use symbols to bypass language barriers, using words only where they provide the most critical clarity.
- Martial Artist: I've practiced Okinawan Goju Ryu for the better part of my life, long enough that I inevitably ended up teaching. The discipline and structure required to excel in traditional training directly influenced my engineering workflow and my workflow in general. I model software the way I model traditional training—through structure, progression, and continuous growth and refinement.
Recent Work
Most of my projects combine 3D graphics, interactive UI, and full-stack development. Here are a few highlights:
Pneuma
An experimental AI personality architecture for LLMs. I wanted to see what would happen if an LLM was forced to hold contradictions instead of smoothing them over. It uses 46 philosophical "archetypes" that collide with each other—pairing thinkers like Camus and Frankl to generate responses that aren't generic or sycophantic.
NUCAT
Inspired by the ASCII art of the dial-up era, I built a real-time ASCII point cloud renderer. I designed and rigged the character, then engineered a GPU-efficient pipeline to break it into ~20,000 particles using Three.js and instanced rendering. The skeleton animation still runs underneath while the surface dissolves into entropy.
Nexus Geom Lab
A gamified 4D geometry exploration platform. Users manipulate 24 hyperdimensional shapes—tesseracts, quantum manifolds, Hessian polychorons—and save configurations they find appealing. Each save unlocks animated 3D characters (Icarus-X, Vectra, Nexus-Prime) that I modeled and rigged, creating a feedback loop that rewards curiosity. Full-stack with React Three Fiber, MongoDB, JWT auth, and audio-reactive visuals driven by real-time FFT analysis.
Tamagotchi Transcendence
My first major 3D project. I modeled and rigged a character in Blender, created 32 custom animations, and built the evolution sim in Three.js. The creature evolves based on care, with visual changes in light, color, and size. It includes a hidden Battle Arena built in React Three Fiber.
Numeneon
My capstone project. I served as UI and System Architect—designing the layout, building the component library, and writing the task architecture. The main feature is a "River" timeline that solves digital congestion by displaying content in parallel currents to keep the feed from feeling overwhelming.
Development Velocity
Over the past year, I've built around 43 projects. Most began as experiments or assignments, but I used them as a way to put into practice what I had just understood while it was fresh. Some became full apps; others spawned new projects as byproducts. I focus on taking the basic bounds of a task and discovering how to push the creative limits of the architecture. It's about turning chaos into something that works.