I’ve been on the web for 15 years. But it started way before that.

Seventh grade. I got sent to a weekend STEM conference at UOP in Stockton. I came home, took apart the family computer, put it back together, and it turned on. My mom wasn’t thrilled about it. But something clicked that day that never really unclicked.

I grew up in a family of artists. Creativity, colors, shapes, graphic design. That was the air in our house. We had Windows 95. No internet yet, so I played Minesweeper and made things in Paint. I watched my dad make art. That was enough.

By high school I was at a technical school where desktop computing was part of the curriculum. At home and at school, I was on computers. Learning software, learning operating systems. I didn’t think much of it at the time. My family wasn’t in tech. But I had access, and more importantly, I had permission. My parents always said: try stuff, run experiments. See where you land. That’s the joy of art.

Art is never finished. It’s always iterative. That principle has lived in everything I’ve built since.

I went to college ready to study computer science. And then I found out it was a lot more theoretical than I wanted. I needed application. I needed something more hands-on. So I pivoted into cognitive science.

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary degree. Six fields, one question:

  • Computer Science
  • Neuroscience
  • Philosophy
  • Psychology
  • Anthropology
  • Linguistics

All of them studying the mind from different angles, building different assumptions, operating in different contexts. That’s exactly the kind of learning I was hungry for.

Those classes were hard. Berkeley is no joke. But it confirmed something for me: I genuinely love the space where humans and computers meet. HCI (human-computer interaction) wasn’t just a field of study. It was a lens that made everything else make sense.

On the first day of Cog Sci 1, the professor said something that I still think about: “We use the brain to study itself, so how do we know it’s not lying to us?”

That line created a thought loop that hasn’t stopped. You don’t know what you don’t know. But you can know. And the brain is built for that. There are methods. There are ways in. Lean into them.

My mom always said: “All that you need is within you right now.”

I had the woo-woo version and the neuroscience version of the same idea living side by side. Turns out they say the same thing.

All of these pieces (the art, the computers, the cognitive science, the HCI rabbit hole) have been accumulating. And now I’m at a point where the overlaps are undeniable.

This blog is where I’m going to put all of it. Humans and technology. Experiments I’m running. Things that didn’t work. Things that did. How it all connects.

Right now I’m running about six different experiments at once, all in different contexts, all with some kind of overlap. It’s been quite the ride.

I’m glad you’re here for it.

How many experiments are you running right now?