What I
carry with me

"Light does not wait."

I photograph with what I have for now. Not because the phone is the point, but because the eye is. What I am learning is how to see: the angle of a shadow, the symmetry of a structure, the way a colour shifts at the edge of a frame.

Photography is somewhere I want to go further. Better gear, darker rooms, more time. The phone is a starting point, not the destination.

"A system with infinite outputs from finite inputs."

Six strings. Twelve frets. An almost absurd amount of combinations. I came to guitar the same way I come to most things: by wanting to understand how it works, then losing track of time actually playing it.

Music is the one space where being wrong sounds interesting. A missed note becomes a different note. That relationship with error is one I try to carry into everything else I build.

"The universe is not large. It is patient."

I have been fascinated by space for as long as I can remember. Not just the scale of it, but the precision. The fact that we can predict where a planet will be in two thousand years from equations written on Earth is, to me, one of the most extraordinary things humans have ever done.

Astronomy is what pulled me toward physics, and physics toward engineering. Everything connects. The orbit of a satellite and the trajectory of a robotic arm are solved with the same tools.

"The best games teach you how to think, not what to do."

I grew up with games, but I never just played them. I always wanted to know how the rules worked: why a mechanic felt satisfying, where the difficulty curve broke, how the world was built. Games are interactive systems, and systems are what I find most interesting about everything.

Some games reshaped how I approach problems. The puzzle that forced me to think backwards. The strategy game that taught me to accept incomplete information. I bring those lessons into code and design without always realising it.

"A book is someone else's thinking, slowed down enough to catch."

I read to encounter minds that work differently from mine. Science, fiction, essays, history: the genre matters less than the quality of thought. I am looking for the sentence that reframes something I thought I already understood.

Reading is the slowest thing I do. I have learned to value that.

"You cannot win a rally alone."

Volleyball is where I learned to trust other people's decisions in real time. There is no pause, no undo. The ball is either going over the net or it is not, and each of the six players made that happen together.

Team sports are a strange kind of distributed system. Everyone running a local decision, shared global objective. I find that genuinely interesting, beyond just enjoying the game.