When people look at my career today, they usually see what’s on the surface. Media and Entertainment. Gaming. Cloud Architecture. Creative technology. A long list of projects over the years.

The question I get most often is simple: How did you get started? The honest answer is not what most people expect. It started with anime.

It Was the Common Language

Before I understood technology, workflows, or career paths, anime was the thing that connected me to people.

In middle school and high school, I didn’t have a huge circle. But the friends I did make were because of shared interests. We watched the same shows. We talked about the same characters. That common ground made it easy to connect.

One friend led to another. Conversations led to curiosity. Curiosity led to trying things. At the time, it didn’t feel like anything important. It was just what we liked.

Looking back now, almost every major shift in my early life traces back to that starting point.

Learning Without Knowing It Was Training

Wanting to share VHS tapes pushed us to figure things out.

Tapes were bulky. Not easy to duplicate. So we experimented. We connected a VCR to a Windows 98 PC using WinTV and started digitizing footage. We learned about file formats like AVI, MPEG2, and DIVX through pure trial and error.

There were no tutorials. No YouTube. No roadmap. Just curiosity and patience. We messed things up constantly. Files wouldn’t work. Audio would desync. Quality would look terrible. So we tried again. And again. At the time, it felt like tinkering.

Now I realize we were learning video encoding, compression, workflows, and troubleshooting without even knowing those terms yet.

That foundation carried into everything I did later in post-production, media pipelines, gaming systems, and cloud infrastructure. It didn’t feel like career preparation. It was just us trying to make things work.

Building Before Knowing What It Meant

We also built websites. GeoCities pages about our favorite series. Simple layouts. Fan art. HTML that barely held together. But we built them anyway. Those early sites taught me how to structure ideas. How to present content. How to think about user experience before I knew what that phrase meant.

It gave me permission to create without waiting for approval. No audience metrics. No strategy. Just building because we wanted to. That mindset stayed with me.

The Right People at the Right Time

What stands out most now isn’t just the technical learning. It’s the people.

Many of the relationships that shaped my direction started from shared interests rooted in that world. Not formal networking. Not resumes. Just conversation. That common ground built trust early.

Through those friendships, I was exposed to environments, tools, and ways of thinking that eventually influenced how I approached work. It didn’t hand me opportunities directly. But it put me in proximity to them. And proximity matters.

When Passion Crossed Into Work

Eventually, what started as a hobby blended into professional life. Media became work. Creativity became responsibility. That shift changes things.

But the mindset I developed early on stayed consistent. Stay curious. Test things. Don’t be afraid to break something and fix it. Enjoy the process.

When work gets procedural or overly metric-driven, I still think back to those early days. The simplicity of figuring something out just because you wanted to. That’s something I try not to lose.

Looking Back

Anime didn’t hand me a career.

• It gave me a starting point.
• It gave me people.
• It gave me curiosity.
• It gave me a reason to experiment.

Everything else built from there.

It’s strange to think something you watched as a kid could quietly shape so much of your life. But in my case, it did. Even now, it’s still part of who I am.