Hi, I’m Ashley.
Welcome to my cozy corner of the internet.
I’m Ashley, a software engineer, serial builder, and traveler based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Growing up, I wanted to build like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. I didn’t know exactly what that meant yet, but I knew I was fascinated by people who could imagine something that didn’t exist and then build it.
Ironically, my primary school academic focus wasn’t technology at all. In middle school and high school, I majored in law (Business and Constitutional). I competed in debate and participated in the Penn Law High School Competition, where I argued legal cases before attorneys who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. I wrote more legal case studies than I can count. I literally planned to become a lawyer as an adult until I learned the internals of a computer.
My junior year in high school, I participated in an after-school technology program, where I learned the internals of a computer. I studied the components that make up a computer, built my very first PC from scratch, and eventually donated it to a local church. That project sparked a curiosity that has never really gone away. This is what motivated me to learn CS fundamentals in college.
Looking back, those experiences shaped how I think today.
Law taught me to reason from first principles, analyze tradeoffs, and build arguments from evidence. Software engineering gave me another medium for solving problems. Instead of arguing how systems should work, I could design and build them.
I’ve always been curious about how things work at the deepest levels—not just software, but everything. Surface-level understanding has never been enough for me.
Computers. Databases. Distributed systems. Financial markets. Organizations. Culture. Even the human brain.
That curiosity has led me from backend engineering and data infrastructure to AI, databases, and distributed systems. Today I spend my time building software, reading, and writing about the engineering decisions behind real-world systems.