BIO

Writing about yourself is always challenging, but here goes.

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I'm a Bay Area born-and-raised artist and technology enthusiast, and from the word "go," the two have been intertwined. At five years old, my family bought a Tandy 1000 personal computer (16 colors!); at the same time, I was building a promising LEGO collection. Throughout my childhood, I drew, I played video games, I wrote short stories. When I was ten, my grandfather taught me how to program in QuickBasic (remember that? No? Just me?), and I began coding my own computer games.

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My teenage years were spent expanding on all of that (usually at the cost of my high school career). I worked essentially as a solo artist; if I needed something, I learned how to do it. And so at any given time I was making:

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• Computer games

• Card games

• Short stories

• Drawings/sketches (media were colored pencils and Pentel markers)

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Eventually I also developed an interest in computer hardware, and learned how to build my own PC. I also began writing screenplays. Realizing the screenwriter was the low man on the totem pole, I decided to learn to direct, and began taking those classes in community college before pursuing it at the University of California, San Diego. I directed several short films during this period.

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At the same time, I was able to leverage my talent for writing and passion for technology to steadily build a career writing buyer's guides and reviewing computer hardware. My professional life and my artistic life ran constantly parallel, and I found that advances in computer hardware gave me new tools to use in my artistic endeavors.

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I graduated college in 2009, directly into the recession. The only consistent work I could find was freelance writing work, and so I began gradually building up a career in technology press. NotebookReview (RIP) led to The Tech Report led to AnandTech, and in 2013 I jumped the fence and began working at Corsair. Less than two years into a job in Technical Marketing, I chose to test my chops as a born critic against actual product management. It's one thing to critique from the outside but another entirely to have to make the tough decisions.