About Me
Building houses
In middle school, I was one of those Sims players who never actually played the game. I built houses. I could lose a whole day to one. When Minecraft came along, building got simpler, and I'm still trying to make the perfect town.
Turnaround Day
I started teaching myself to build websites at 15.
I was born with my vision the way it is now, and it's never changed. The easiest way to describe it is like looking through a peephole with one eye. Every summer I went to the state's program for blind kids, and at 18 I enrolled in their adjustment to blindness program. It was marketed as something every respectable blind person did. To me it felt like an Asian kid going to college: it's just what you do. It turned out not to be a good fit, but that's a story for another day.
The program had a tradition called Turnaround Day, when the students became the teachers. I took over the computer class and decided to teach the teachers HTML. To do that, I built my first real website, a set of instructions hosted on a free subdomain. I added some personality to it. The teachers laughed at lines like "ain't nobody got time for that," but they laughed even harder at my typos, like "we can must now…"
My first paying client
I volunteered on the website for the Hawaii Association of the Blind. Friends there introduced me to a classmate who worked at Guide Dogs of Hawaii, and that became my first paying job.
I worked there from late 2017 to August 2024. I built their website, then rebuilt it with a new custom theme, then did it again. I was still struggling with design, and I was never happy with how it turned out. There are no pictures from back then, and I'm not sorry.
Finding a process
Design finally made sense for me in the Creative Media program at UH West Oʻahu. The class that did the most for me was creative strategy. It focused on logos and branding, but what I really took from it was a process, and I've adapted it for every creative project since.
The first time I used it on real work was for the Hawaii State Society of Medical Assistants. Three years later, I'm still not embarrassed by it.
The detour
In August 2024, I left Guide Dogs of Hawaii to start my own business. I wanted to finally build the games and templates I'd been putting off. Instead, I got pulled into client work and stayed there. Leaving the job turned out to be easier than getting the job out of me. I kept avoiding the work I actually left to do: educational content, like vocational courses under Adaptive Learning for the Blind and games for kids.
Coming back
Now I'm building things for myself again, including web templates and an accessible game engine, and writing about how I make each one. This blog is where that work shows up.
Other roles
I serve on the boards of Travel Visions Aloha for the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind of Hawaiʻi, and I'm part of the NFB's Honolulu chapter. I also maintain websites and social media for NFB NEWSLINE Hawaiʻi and the Hawaiʻi Statewide Independent Living Council.
Outside of work
- I live in Honolulu.
- I've played ukulele since I was 5 and violin since I was 11.
- I drew manga in middle school.
- My current games are The Battle of Polytopia and Pokémon Sword, and I'm starting to explore D&D and Warhammer.
- My favorite anime are Blue Lock, Classroom of the Elite, and March Comes In Like a Lion.
- My Kindle library has more than 300 books, and I read along with the Hardcore Literature Book Club.
- I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
- I design in Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud, and I build with Next.js, TypeScript, AWS Amplify, Vite, and Unity.
- I work on a MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro.
- I use the built-in magnifier on my Mac, and I'm teaching myself braille with the free eReader from the library for the blind.