I'm a jack of all trades, master of none. Currently, I am a product manager at Microsoft. I love to learn new things by reading, listening to podcasts, asking lots of questions, and building new things that help others. I also love photography.

I taught myself to code and build products by watching tutorials on the internet and by just building. My most popular app is the Delightful gratitude journal app.

I'm from Iowa but have lived in Virginia, Illinois, California, Vietnam, and now Washington state.

Family, friends, and creating things to help other people are the most important things to me. This open-source portfolio website for example was made to help product managers easily create an online presence.

FUN GOALS

1. I love reading historical fiction books & dream of writing a book in this genre one day. The book I'm reading right now that I really love is The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai.

2. I want to keep learning new programming languages and tech stacks every year because it's fun to learn how things work and get made. For example, I recently learned some Python to automate image generation for my open-source Viet.io site listing Vietnamese tech companies. You can see the Python scripts on GitHub, it was fun to learn.

3. I've run a half-marathon in the past, I'd like to at least try running a marathon someday.

4. I can understand a bit of other languages, but I want to get better at conversing in other languages.

5. I dream of growing my own home garden one day.

PRODUCT STUFF

What's my favorite mobile app?

My favorite app is the Amazon Kindle app because like I mentioned before I love to read. I appreciate the weekly and daily Reading Insights feature that encourages me to read everyday to keep my streak alive. I also like Kindle's Whispersync feature that allows me to easily switch between mobile and Kindle devices to keep reading where I left off. I also love to highlight books and export my highlights to PDF to read later, which as far as I know only Kindle devices allow you to send a PDF export of your highlights to an email address - it would be nice if this feature comes to the mobile apps.

What are your sources of inspiration?

When I started making mobile applications in 2015 I was a bit lost when it came to design. I started just paying attention to the applications I was using everyday on my phone that I loved. The app that I believe was ahead of its time with amazing UI/UX was the Wunderlist task management application. I loved the colors and functional design of the app. Over time, I've continued to stay up to date with Google and Apple design standards while keeping an eye out for apps that don't exactly adhere to the standards and in some ways shape the future design standards.

Beyond the surface, the most important source of inspiration to develop better apps is your users. My Delightful users have given me direct feedback that over time made me a much better product maker. As a product maker, it's awesome if you can be the user of your product but you have to get out of your own way and be conscious that you are not the only user of your product.