For years I designed systems I could not build. Brands, storefronts, campaigns, all of it handed off at the moment it got interesting. So I enrolled, learned to write the code myself, and stopped handing anything off.
Most businesses do not need more software. They need someone to look at what they already have, find the three things costing them a day a week, and fix those. I do the diagnosis and the build, because the person who scoped it should be the person who ships it.
I spent a decade in design before I wrote production code. That order matters. Engineers build what you asked for. Designers ask what you are actually trying to do. Doing both means the system fits the business instead of the other way around.
Not a straight line. Every step turned out to be a prerequisite for the next one.
Started the design business and landed The Mahjong Line, a premium lifestyle brand that needed more than a logo. Storefront, product design, and a visual system that had to hold up across every touchpoint. Five years later they are still a client.
DesignWent back for a degree while running the business. Client work by day, coursework at night. The plan was to close the gap between what I could design and what I could actually build.
SchoolNot the demos. The unglamorous part: where a model belongs inside a real workflow, where it does not, and how to build around the fact that it is sometimes wrong. That distinction is most of the job now.
Turning pointHeaded the student body for the specialization. Teaching a room full of people who will poke holes in a bad explanation is the fastest way to find out whether you actually understand something.
LeadershipBachelor's in Creative Computation from SMU. My senior capstone was Litterbug, a working app I built and presented to a room of a hundred people. First time I took something from an idea to a live product with an audience watching, which is roughly what every client engagement has felt like since.
Degree earnedCPK Collective, a Dallas apartment locating business paying $800 a month for a platform that did not fit how they worked. I replaced it with a custom client dashboard, automated reporting, and a CRM integration built around their actual process. That project is what turned a design shop into an automation practice.
The pivotRenamed the business to say what it actually does. Launched Snailmail. Formalized the partnership with Near Me Marketing, where they own the audience layer and I own the systems layer. More partnerships in progress. The design work did not go away, it just became the reason the software fits.
NowPrint, then design, then a degree, then code. It looks like four careers. It was one, and it took all four to be able to sit across from an owner, understand the business, and go build the fix myself.
Start with an audit. You will know inside a week whether this is worth doing.
Apply to work together →