[Beyond]
Warning! unnecessary personal journey ahead.
I started as a freelance designer while I was in college. My first client asked me to design a set of game cards, so I went all in on the graphics. He liked the work enough to pay me a little extra - I still don’t know why, but that appreciation stuck with me. It pushed me deeper into design.
From graphic design, I moved into web design and started learning more about UX research, interactions, and how people actually experience products. But after a while, I wanted more than just designing them.
I wanted to build what I designed.
Back then, AI wasn’t capable enough for me to rely on it for building products, so I decided to learn full-stack development from scratch. It took me nearly a year to become comfortable building things on my own. Somewhere along the way, I realised how interesting it was to bring design and development together - I could think about the experience and actually make it work.
Then AI became much more capable, and naturally, I started exploring it too. I learned how AI could fit into the products I was already designing and building, rather than treating it as something separate.
Today, I enjoy taking an idea from UX research → design → development → AI integration → deployment. I can explore the problem, shape the experience, build the product, make it AI-powered when it genuinely adds value, and ship it.
That’s probably the part of my journey I’m most excited about - not having to choose between design, code, and AI.