Translation is the hard part of complex work. Making something technically intricate legible to someone who doesn't share your context is a different skill than understanding it yourself. An advisor, a teammate, a business leader, a person who loves you: all different conversations. That's the skill I've spent most of my career building.

I came up through math and physics, then spent time at Los Alamos and UCLA studying space physics. That sounds esoteric, and it is. Space physics is not a field that makes cocktail party conversation easy. What it did teach me was how to hold a genuinely difficult idea and find the right door into it for whoever was standing in front of me. The grad student version, the advisor version, the undergrad version, the partner-at-dinner version: all different conversations, all about the same thing. That practice turned out to be more durable than any specific domain knowledge I picked up.

When I left academia, I went to Samsung. I moved from tracking anomalous events in time series data from the Cassini spacecraft to tracking anomalous events in time series data from Galaxy phones. From the galaxy out there to the galaxy in your pocket. The physics changed. The pattern recognition didn't. Neither did the need to explain what you found to people who care about very different things.

What followed was a fast move from analyst to developer advocate, a role that is at its core about translation. Taking something technical and making it accessible without making it wrong. That work grew at CircleCI, where I got better at long-form technical content: the kind that respects the reader's intelligence and still meets them where they are.

I approach problems differently than most people I work with. The path that got me here didn't go the way anyone planned, including me. The bumps are in there. So is everything I know.