I am a naturally curious and hardworking person. I was born in Seattle Washington and grew up in the area. I studied various different martial arts, read everything I could get my hands on and even went to acting school for a little while. The only things I learned during my single year there were how to speak, how to move and how to juggle. Strangely, the last of these three seems to have proven the most useful in daily life. Go figure. In 2007, everything changed when I got married and moved to Japan with my wife. I was 25. I was a kid. I didn’t know anything about anything. But, I took the recommendation of my father, an immigrant himself from the UK, to give it a go. And give it a go I did.

Learning to function in a foreign country by learning the language and starting my own business taught me a lot about who I am and how the world works. The main lesson I have learned thus far is that the quality of your life very much depends on the quality of the people in your life and your relationship with them. When we take one path in life over another it’s impossible to say what might have been. But I am the type that can’t help but wonder what would’ve have a happened if I’d turned left instead of right? Said “yes” instead of “no”. These are quandaries that I believe plague us all in our short human lives. And they are extremely short. We are born with no owner’s manual and only the guidance, often barely accessible through the fatigue and stresses of our guardians, to see us through our formative years. And from there it’s basically follow your interests and maybe learn a thing or two without doing any harm. A lot is learned in retrospect and with no official answer as to whether or not our decisions were truly the best among the options at the time. One thing is for sure though, the challenges I have faced and overcome in my life have made me a better person and a more positive force in the world.

Currently, I still live in Japan with my wife and 3 children. I have sold my small business and am now focusing full time on software development. It is an amazing industry full of creativity, generosity and some of the most amazing people you could ever hope to meet. I feel blessed to be a part of it and wake up everyday looking forward to being able to help someone solve a problem.