The first time I made a webpage render, I felt like I'd gained a superpower.

I was glued to the Nintendo, and the only three things I ever wanted to be were a psychologist, a bartender (basically a psychologist with flair), and a teacher. Education runs in my blood. My grandmother taught kindergarten, and my grandfather was a custodian at the local middle school.

I spent ten years in the Clark County School District. I taught second through fifth grade across different years, worked as an elementary technology-integration specialist, wrote curriculum for a while, and became a digital learning coach. Mike Lang was my digital learning coach before I ever became one, and the two of us started The Intelligent Hoodlums.

Somewhere in there I became an Apple Distinguished Educator and, this being Las Vegas, a World Series of Poker dealer. That one is a story for another time.

When I started thinking about leaving the classroom, I didn't know what came next, and I couldn't afford another degree or a bootcamp. A friend said, "Why not technology? You've always loved it." I told him I couldn't pay to retrain. He said, "You're a teacher. You can build your own curriculum." That's what I did, and it helps to have people who believe in you that deeply. I taught myself to code, and the technologist and the teacher in me finally got to work together. At ThoughtWorks, and in the years since, I've worked across full-stack, security, infrastructure, and product. I got to work with Karen Palmer on RIOT and Perception.io.

Software decides who gets left out, and most of the time nobody meant for it to. It shows up in who gets chosen as the default face on an avatar, in whether an automatic faucet and hand dryer can sense darker skin, and in whether a form understands a second-language learner or penalizes them. The industry files these under edge cases. Each one is a person, and together they're a market you're turning away.

I treat accessibility, security, and data transparency as the foundation rather than a luxury you add if there's budget left over. Skipping them is a bet that no deal will ever hinge on them. The biggest deals are the ones that do. Building them in is the cheaper choice and the ethically right one. I know the psychology under the design rules, which is what tells me when to follow them and when a product is better off breaking them. Anyone can run a checklist. Knowing why it exists is the harder part, and it's what I've spent my career learning.

I think about a software team the way I think about elite athletes. Treat people well, understand what makes them tick, and be relentless about the environment they work in. Do that, and you attract the best talent, who build the best product. The storied franchises in sports are built on exactly that. Mike reminds me that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Being an athlete and a musician taught me the same thing from the inside. Get solid on the fundamentals, run a system for how you attack a problem, and the work comes out reliable, extensible, and fast.

Technology shapes the world, and the people who build it decide how. It became a pebble in my shoe that some practices sold as the best way to work, pair programming among them, didn't hold up against what I knew about how people actually learn. I don't say that to knock anyone who swears by them, since everyone is doing the best they can with what they know. I wanted teams to have evidence instead of folklore, so I made it my dissertation, a mixed-method study of communication and collaboration in cross-functional software teams. I'm finishing it this fall.

Understanding how people learn and understanding the code are usually two different people. I'm both. I don't want to become the thing you can't run without. I teach as I go, because I'd rather leave your team able to build the next thing without me than dependent on me.