From sysadmin to senior frontend

I spent six years as a system administrator — Cisco and VLAN networking, servers, backups, the scripting that holds an IT department together. It was good work, and it's where the comfort with infrastructure, CI/CD, and the command line comes from.

The turn came from something small. I wrote a script to parse a phone number database for a marketing campaign, and the feeling of solving a problem by building something — rather than by configuring something — didn't go away. I moved into web development, started with Vue.js and D3.js, and settled on React because it held up best on the complex projects I wanted to work on. I haven't looked back.

Since then I've worked across startups and larger companies, in office and remote, including US-based teams. Three of those years were on the merchant dashboard at Omise, a Southeast Asian payment gateway — the surface businesses use to watch their own money move, where the correctness bar sits higher than a typical CRUD UI and has to keep holding while the product, the codebase, and the team all grow around it. Most recently I was the sole frontend engineer on a three-person team building a B2B hiring platform, owning the entire web frontend from design handoff to continuous deployment.

I care about TypeScript, testing, and CI/CD — not as checkboxes, but because they're what make a complex codebase stay workable. I focus on doing things right rather than only fast, and I'd rather be part of a team than clear a ticket queue.