I started on Neopets.
Now I untangle enterprise systems for the automotive industry. My title says Leading Technical Consultant, but my days look like hands-on engineering with a backend bias. I can step up as a tech lead, but I'd rather be in the code. Brownfield or greenfield, legacy or launch-day — I work across the stack to make complex things simple and tangled code clear. I'm also the person who sits with the customer, asks the annoying questions, and finds the requirements they forgot to mention. That usually means code, sometimes means CI/CD or infrastructure, and lately it means figuring out what to ask an LLM to get useful answers back.
That Neopets part matters. I learned this because I wanted to, not because I had to.