I got into this sideways.

I was building WordPress sites for people who needed them, and I kept hitting the same thing. The site worked. The client was happy. Six months later nobody was using half of it.

That bothered me more than it should have. It turned out I was solving the wrong problem, quite well. So I went and learned the other half of the job, and the reason I’m useful now is that I know what breaks in the gap between them.

These days I mostly work on products with real structural complexity underneath — payments, verification, multi-role platforms. The kind where the interesting questions are about what the system is actually made of, not what colour the button should be. I still write the code. I think that keeps me honest.

The teaching came later and I didn’t expect to like it as much as I do. Explaining a decision to someone who has no reason to be impressed by you is the fastest way to find out whether it was a good one.