Designer turned
engineer.

THE START

I spent five years as a professional graphic designer and marketing lead before I wrote a single line of production code. That path wasn't a detour — it's where I learned how to think about the people on the other side of an interface.

Working in design meant daily decisions about hierarchy, clarity, and trust. What does this button tell the user is about to happen? What does this layout say about the organisation behind it? Those questions don't go away when you move from Figma to a code editor. If anything, they get sharper.

THE TRANSITION

The move into engineering was gradual and deliberate. I started building things I'd previously handed off to developers — then kept going. The gap between design intent and implementation had always frustrated me. The only real fix was to close it myself.

I went deep on frontend: component architecture, state management, performance, accessibility. Then broader: backend APIs, build tooling, deployment pipelines. The design background didn't disappear — it became a lens I use to evaluate technical decisions, not just visual ones.

CURRENT WORK

At Paradigm Testing I'm the frontend lead on a platform migration that's replacing a third-party JSP/jQuery system with a React + TypeScript stack we own outright. Medical licensing exams run daily on this platform — so the migration is happening live, in parallel, with no disruption to candidates. Zero dropped exams to date.

Beyond the migration, I own the UX redesign, run daily standups, review code, and handle escalations when something goes wrong during an exam window. I've also done performance work across both portals — audit, remediation, and CI guardrails — and built out parts of the backend in Spring Boot.

OUTSIDE THE DAY JOB

I take freelance projects when the problem is interesting — an admin mapping tool for ICOC, a GCS-backed content platform for a Grand Archive TCG sandbox tool. Both full-cycle: requirements through handoff. The constraint of owning the whole thing, solo, is a useful forcing function for prioritisation.