About

I'm a design-focused frontend software engineer in Austin, Texas. Before I wrote software I was a working musician and guitar instructor. My training was in jazz (performance degrees from the University of North Texas), and these days I make guitar courses at garnerguitar.com.

The practice room turned out to be excellent training for this job. Jazz is a discipline of structured improvisation: you internalize the fundamentals so deeply that you can respond to whatever the moment throws at you, and you develop an ear for nuance. That's the same muscle that catches a two-pixel misalignment or an interaction that's technically correct but feels wrong.

Since 2021 I've been at Indeed, working on employer-facing products, the tools businesses use to find and hire people. Along the way I've gravitated to the seam between design and engineering: pixel-perfection, design systems, accessibility, and the details that don't survive a handoff unless someone owns them on both sides. I care about the Don Norman fundamentals of human-centered design: clear affordances, immediate feedback, and interfaces that match the user's mental model instead of the database schema. I also like forgiving interfaces; an undo beats a confirmation dialog.

Outside of work hours I build and ship my own products end-to-end: tutti-ui, a cross-platform design system (which this site is built with); offline-first mobile apps with AI coaching (Rhythm Fit, Tribe Tracker); and the course platform guitar students actually pay for.

I believe in approaching everything with a growth mindset: always learning, always pushing forward. It's how you survive as a musician, and it's how you stay good at the quick-paced always changing world of software.