i'm a curious student of artificial intelligence and a chess player. i tend to treat both the same way, as a search problem where the right move is rarely the obvious one.
i actually come from a pre-med background. i spent a few years buried in bio, physics, and chemistry before switching lanes into AI. what pulled me over was neural nets, and more specifically the pure math sitting underneath them: the idea that intelligence might just be geometry wearing a disguise.
these days i'm mostly vibe-coding and shipping small, slightly odd things instead of grinding through another course. python, C, and PHP cover the logic side of what i build, and the standard web stack (HTML, CSS, JS) covers everything people actually see. i've laid out the full toolkit, plus what's next on the list, on the skills page.
right now i'm shipping a[e]x, a flight-anomaly-detection project living somewhere in the aero-AI simulation niche. the short version: teaching a model to notice when a flight is quietly going wrong before a human would.
past apex, i've started messing around in blender. game dev feels like the natural next step, since it's code, art, and systems design all fighting for the same canvas. long-term, i want to end up building something in the aero/sim world. flight simulation was probably the gateway drug.
i learn by breaking things faster than a tutorial can explain them. most of what's below started as a project that didn't work yet.
picked up blender for game dev, mostly because building playable worlds felt like a good excuse to finally learn 3d. it's early, but it's the direction i'm leaning, alongside apex and whatever comes after it in the space/sim space.
when i'm not writing code, i'm probably watching game of thrones or stranger things. i like stories that make competence look expensive: every good move costs someone something, and nobody gets to keep all their pieces. for music it's funk and beats, anything with a groove that leaves the rest of the track room to breathe. good background for a late-night vibe-coding session.
i picked up chess almost by accident, during a stretch where school felt like noise and i wanted one thing that was quiet and fair. a board doesn't care how your day went. it just sits there with 32 pieces and a rule set, waiting for you to think clearly. that turned out to be exactly what i needed. i wasn't looking for a hobby so much as somewhere to put my head when everything else felt loud, and chess ended up doing more for my focus than anything a doctor or a to-do list ever did. it's the closest thing i have to a mental therapy: an hour on the board and i come out calmer than i went in, even after i lose.
from there it turned into an actual obsession. i spend a lot of time replaying magnus carlsen's games move by move, less for the openings and more for how he handles pressure in positions that aren't clearly winning yet. that translates surprisingly well to debugging: most of the time you're not looking for the flashy move, you're looking for the one that doesn't lose. the goal, eventually, is to actually be a grandmaster, not just a strong player. it's a long road, but so is everything else i actually care about.
if you want a game, hmu for a match lol.
i try to live loosely by wabi-sabi, finding peace in imperfection, and in the pace things actually move at instead of the pace i wish they moved at. i came across the idea while reading about japanese aesthetics, but it stuck because it matched something i already believed about code and chess: the cracked bowl is still a bowl, the losing game still taught you something, the unfinished project still counted as building. most of what i ship isn't finished, and for a while that used to bother me. now i've made peace with it, because waiting for "finished" is usually just a way of never shipping at all. most interesting things stay a little unfinished on purpose, mine included.
on the more practical side, i'm interested in systems for wealth creation, not as a shortcut, but as strategic planning applied to a longer timeline. i don't think about it as "getting rich," i think about it the way i think about a chess position: what's the move that's still good ten moves from now, not just the one that looks good today. build things that compound instead of things that expire, learn skills that stack instead of skills that expire with a trend, and be patient enough to let the slow stuff actually finish compounding. the chess habit and the coding habit are both, if i'm honest, just practice for this: reading a position, committing to a plan, and staying patient while it plays out, even when the board looks unclear for longer than you'd like.