I've loved maps for as long as I can remember. Paper maps, specifically. The kind with contour lines and elevation markers and little triangles where the peaks are.
I think that comes from moving a lot. I was born to immigrant parents in Austin, Texas. Then we moved to Laredo, right on the Mexican border. Then briefly to Bangladesh. Then Toronto when I was 10. After that it was back to Texas, the Bay Area, and finally New York. Every time you land somewhere new, one of the first things you do is look at a map. Where am I? What's around me? How does this place connect to the last one?
Maps became how I made sense of new places. And borders became something I thought about constantly, because I kept crossing them.
borders
Laredo sits right on the Rio Grande. You can stand on one side of a bridge and be in one country, walk across, and everything changes. The language, the currency, the way people greet each other. But the land is the same. The river doesn't care about the line drawn across it.
That always stuck with me. Borders are human constructions laid over continuous terrain. They define how people experience a place, but the ground underneath doesn't change. Growing up around that teaches you to see borders as something you can navigate, not something that stops you.
My career has been a lot of border crossings. Engineering to product management. Rockets (SpaceX) to social platforms (Twitter). Fifteen-person startups to companies with tens of thousands of people. Each crossing meant learning a new language, a new set of norms, a new map.
the book
The direct spark for this website was Orae: Experiences on the Border by Vanessa Lacaille. "Orae" is Latin for borders, and the book is a narrative guide to the buildings, structures, and infrastructures that accumulate around them. The authors worked in situ with people living in border regions across Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Iran, Afghanistan, and Eritrea. Checkpoints, green borders, go-slow zones for cross-border workers, crypto mining farms, tax havens. All the strange things that pile up where one jurisdiction meets another.
The cover is what got me. It's this cartographic layout with points of interest mapped across a survey, each one labeled and annotated. The book's central argument is that borders lack a political project, that we haven't really thought about what these spaces could be. The authors spent time with people who actually live in these zones, collecting fragmentary narratives about what border life looks like up close.
Reading it, I kept thinking about Laredo. About all the crossings I've made since. The idea of mapping my own border experiences, making them something you can explore visually, felt like the right next step. What if my website was a topographic survey of my own territory?
mountains
The other piece is mountaineering. I've been drawn to mountains for years. When you're above treeline, the map in your hand becomes the most important thing you own. You're reading contour lines to find the route, to figure out which ridge will go and which one won't.
Once you've followed contour lines up a 14er and felt the terrain steepen exactly where the lines bunch together on the paper, those abstract rings stop being abstract. I wanted that physical feeling on my website. Each section is a peak with contour rings generated by procedural noise, so they have that organic irregularity that real terrain has.
the details
The compass rose tracks your cursor. The grid coordinates reference Brooklyn, where I live now. There's a small forest labeled "pine valley," a lake in the central valley, annotations scattered around like a surveyor's field notes. The font is Commit Mono (huge shoutout to the creators), which has that precise, cartographic quality. I paired it with Spectral for the body text on these blog posts.
I spent a long time on things most people won't notice, like the specific shade of warm off-white for the background, or the way the outer contour lines extend between peaks to make the whole thing feel like continuous terrain. A map with only peaks and nothing between them looks like clipart. The terrain between the mountains is what makes it believable.
between the peaks
On a topographic map, the peaks get the labels. But the landscape between them is often more interesting. The saddle points where ridges connect. The valleys where water collects. That's where the paths tend to form.
I think careers work like that too. The most useful things I've picked up came from transitions. Moving from C++ flight software to product strategy spreadsheets forced me to rethink how I communicate. Going from a huge company to a tiny startup forced me to rethink what "good enough" means. Those in-between stretches are where the real learning happened.
That's why my website is a map. It's how I actually think about where I've been and where I'm going. Terrain worth surveying.
Go click around the map if you haven't already.