I learned to practice before I learned to build.

Piano taught me the thing that actually transfers: you don’t get better by playing the parts you already know. You isolate the four bars you keep fumbling and stay there. Most of what I do as an engineer is the same move — find the part that’s genuinely hard, stop working around it, and sit in it until it resolves.

I’ve spent an unusual amount of my early career explaining things. Three years as a TA at HCU across Operating Systems, Networks, Advanced Data Structures and Software Engineering — 25+ students a week in office hours, mostly hitting the same three walls: deadlock, what TCP is actually doing, why the object model won’t cooperate. Before that, middle schoolers at Harmony. Now AP CS students one-on-one. It’s changed how I build: if I can’t explain why a design is right to someone who doesn’t already agree, it usually isn’t.

That’s what pulled me toward building for people who can’t check my work. At the Glenda Gordy Research Center I built the crime statistics page anyone in Houston can read — two government sources, different schemas, conflicting counts for the same window. The interesting problem wasn’t the pipeline. It was what to show when the sources disagree, and the page shows the disagreement rather than quietly picking a number.

That question keeps coming back in different clothes. Resuzen scores how well a resume matches a job, so the score is computed in code rather than generated — same inputs, same number, every time. Fixr gives maintenance advice people spend real money on, so it cites the manufacturer’s schedule instead of just sounding sure. A church I hand a site to can’t audit the CMS underneath it, which constrains what I’m allowed to build in the first place. Internal tools can leave ambiguity implicit, because the reader can walk over and ask. Almost nothing I work on has that.

Right now I’m a full-stack engineer at Crime Stoppers of Houston, starting an M.S. in Applied Computing at OU, running Enoch Studio for church and nonprofit clients around Houston, and still playing keys most Sundays. Four things at once, which is roughly how it’s been since 2022.