About
Trained in both halves of the work.
The degree
I hold a dual bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering and Design from UNIST, one of South Korea’s leading science and technology universities, cum laude. That combination is the premise of everything on this site: most engineers who care about design taught themselves the second half, and most designers who code taught themselves the first. I was formally trained in both, at the same time, and graduated with honours in the pairing.
In practice it means the handoff most teams struggle with doesn’t exist in my work. The person choosing the type scale and the person writing the component are the same person, and each decision is made knowing what it costs the other side.
The day job
I’m a frontend engineer at Burt Intelligence, an AdTech SaaS company: production Angular on the frontend, Ruby on Rails behind it. I’m based in the Philippines and work 3 pm to midnight to share my team’s working day in Sweden, so collaboration happens live. Distance still rewards a particular discipline: write clearly, scope changes well, and make the pull request carry the context a hallway chat would have.
The title says frontend; the work does not stay in its lane. I own changes end to end, from the Rails models to the Angular views that render them.
Across cultures
I’m used to being the person from somewhere else. I studied as an international student in South Korea, interned with a US startup, and now ship with a Swedish team from the Philippines. Different norms, different communication styles, same job: understand the people you build with, then build.
How I work
I like small, deliberate systems: two typefaces doing two jobs, tokens instead of one-off values, motion that argues for something instead of decorating it. This site is built the way I build client work: semantic markup, visible focus states, reduced motion respected, metadata that actually works. View source; that’s the pitch.
Elsewhere
The full history is in the CV: internships across VR research, service design, and full-stack engineering at a US startup.