When I was a young kid I would spend most of my time playing with Lego. I’d get lost building a new car or truck, or trying to combine different sets into what I felt was a more interesting design. I’d spend hours building a Lego city, only to defend its destruction from my older sister, who seemed rather entertained undoing my work.

Years later, I was old enough to move from modifying plastic vehicles to wrenching on motorcycles. I was nine when I got my first motorcycle. It was barely a few feet tall and not much louder than a lawnmower. I loved it. I learnt how to weld, how four-stroke and two-stroke engines worked, and quickly grew a love for all things mechanical. I was at home working on things with my hands. My love for motorcycles ended up getting me a job at fourteen sweeping floors in a motorcycle shop, and becoming fairly serious about racing motocross until I was in my late teens.

When I wasn’t fixing or racing motorcyles, I’d spend time with friends from high school. After the sun went down, when we were supposed to be doing homework or sleeping, we’d chat on ICQ and MSN Messenger. As I was curious how things worked, I started to explore the inner parts of Windows XP (anyone remember system.ini?) and began to dabble with Photoshop and HTML. This led me to quickly fall in love with building virtual “things.”

After high school, I decided to study digital and classical animation to gain strength in areas of design I was completely unfamiliar with. Over the last 10 or so years, my career path has weaved through various design and engineering roles. I was a designer at a small interactive agency, lead the front-end engineering team building Club Penguin, I learnt Objective-C and shipped a small app called LittleIpsum, and have freelanced and consulted a number of times. My passion for building products and my grab bag of skills landed me a job at The Obvious Corporation (the company that Medium came out of) in 2011.

Today, I’ve been at Medium for just north of 3.5 years. In that time the company has grown from 6 to a tad over 80 people. I’ve worn many hats, and have worked with many amazing people on many amazing projects. Most recently, I’ve lead the Design team. It has been an incredible learning experience and has been a fantastic and rewarding challenge. But, I’ve been missing something. I haven’t had the chance to scratch the “building” itch.

Starting today, I’m no longer going to be filling the Design Lead Link role. I’m going back to building. I’m going to focus my time on future-looking explorations Ev and I have discussed, that I’m keen to tackle. I’m incredibly curious about the devices we carry around and haven’t had the chance to sink my teeth into the nuances of building a product for them.

Ev is going to take over the responsibilities for the Lead Link of Design until we find a suitable replacement. We are already interviewing a few candidates. I can’t wait to have a new Design Lead who has experience leadings teams, and finds their passion in doing so.

One final note: I haven’t had the chance to travel for an extended amount of time in my life. I went straight into work after school. Because of this, I’m taking next month (March 2015) off. I’m going to travel and explore.

Huge thanks to Medium (and Ev) for being such a wonderful company to work for. I’ve never felt so supported in my career, and can not wait to get back to building.

Feel free to hit me up on slack, email, or in person if you have any questions.