I started teaching myself JavaScript when I was 8 years old, and I quickly fell in love with building things. Over the next nine years, I invested tens of thousands of hours writing over one million lines of code to launch products that solved problems for over one hundred thousand total users. But my background isn't just technical. Born in Kyrgyzstan and raised across the San Francisco Bay Area, Bishkek, and Ottawa, I grew up constantly adapting to change. Moving between three cultures, six languages, and five different schools taught me how to understand multicultural communities, see the world from their perspective, and identify what their issues are and how to solve them. I approach problems as a designer first, focusing on user experience, human empathy, aesthetics, and solving both local and global problems. Today, I obsess over human-centered design and how products function, scale, and ultimately serve the end user.