The through-line

People look at my background and see four or five careers stacked on one person: product and UX design, human factors engineering, IT and network administration, manufacturing and fabrication, field engineering, technical writing. The reasonable conclusion is that I couldn’t decide what to be.

The truer story is the opposite. There was only ever one thing. It just kept showing up in different materials.

It started young

I grew up taking things apart because no one was coming to fix them. Money was tight and the household wasn’t steady, so I learned early that the way you got an unworkable situation to work was to get your hands on it yourself. I had a paper route by the third grade. I was the kid who read The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club and When HARLIE Was One and took them as instruction manuals rather than stories.

What set in back then wasn’t a skill. It was a reflex: when something is broken or baffling, I move toward it, not away. And I trust my hands as much as my head: I don’t fully believe I understand a system until I’ve had it open.

Cognitive science gave it a name

At UC San Diego I studied Cognitive Science with a specialization in human-computer interaction. That’s the academic name for the exact thing I’d been doing since childhood: the study of the seam — the place where a human mind meets an engineered system, where intentions get translated into mechanisms and mechanisms push back.

That seam is where things actually break. Not in the human, not in the machine, but in the gap between them: the misread dial, the assumption the design never checked, the failure mode no one mapped because it lived between two departments. I’d been working that gap on instinct. School taught me to work it on purpose.

One instinct, many materials

Everything since has been the same diagnostic instinct pointed at a different medium.

As an IT consultant for twenty years, it was figuring out why a stranger’s system wouldn’t behave — and, more often than the work order said, why the person and the system kept misunderstanding each other.

As a human factors engineer, it was designing that seam deliberately so people and machines wouldn’t end up fighting in the first place: moving upstream from repair to prevention.

On the factory floor, welding and assembling, it was the hands again: the physical, dirty, real making that keeps the head honest.

As a designer, it was the same move I’d made in human factors, taken further: trying to build better things rather than spend my life patching worse ones.

And in technical writing, it was making the complicated legible, which, it turns out, is just diagnosis aimed at language instead of hardware.

None of these were pivots. They were the same person walking around a problem and picking up whichever tool the problem was shaped for.

What I actually am

I’m a seam-worker. I’m most useful exactly where domains meet and nobody owns the overlap — where the design team and the engineers and the people who’ll actually use the thing are each solving half the problem and no one is solving the gap. I diagnose across boundaries that most people are trained to stay inside. That used to read as not fitting a slot. I’ve come to understand it as the slot itself, at the kind of place that has problems too cross-grained for a specialist to hold alone.

I work best on problems, not job descriptions. Hand me something stuck, baffling, or stranded between two specialties, and that’s the native habitat.

That’s the whole idea behind the name.

Make it go.

Want the longer version? The shop floors, side businesses, and stuck things behind it →