2022 — 2026 / FOUR CHAPTERS
EXPERIENCE TIMELINE.
A straight account of four working years — what I was responsible for, what I learned and where the learning came from. No inflated titles and no claims of leading teams I was a junior member of.
//2022 — Foundation#
First professional year, at a twelve-person product studio. I was the junior on a team of four and spent most of it building marketing sites and internal tools. The lasting lesson came from a senior engineer who made me delete a clever abstraction I'd written and replace it with three repetitive functions, then explain the change to a colleague. The repetition was easier to read, and nobody ever had to learn my invention.
//2023 — Engineering#
Moved into application work: authentication, data tables, forms with genuinely complex validation. Unglamorous and the most useful year I've had. Forms in particular taught me more about state management than any framework tutorial, because a long form is a state machine that a real person will abandon, resume, get wrong and resubmit on a bad connection. I also broke production once, with a migration that assumed a nullable column wasn't null.
//2024 — Interaction#
Started specialising. Took the frontend lead role on the Velocity replatform, which meant learning that the technical work was maybe half the job — the rest was persuading three departments that eight of their eleven tracking scripts were actively costing money.
//2025 — Immersion#
Went independent and moved toward real-time graphics. Wrote my first serious shaders, which meant a long stretch of being incompetent at something after several years of comfort. Aether shipped in this period. 2026 has been Nexus, and the beginning of understanding GPU work as an engineering discipline rather than a bag of tricks.