Three years ago, I moved up to Snoqualmie Ridge with my family. It is the most beautiful place I have lived in my 20+ years in Washington. Imagine every morning waking up and seeing this view when you walk out your front door. When I moved here, I told myself that I would climb that mountain one day. I attempted it with my kids a few years ago. We made it halfway to the top.

To me, that mountain has come to represent a challenge—an unfinished journey, not unlike my career has been. Being a designer can be both a rewarding and frustrating career path. There have been many mountains to climb. This morning when I woke up and saw that mountain, it made me reflect on this journey.

After moving to Seattle in 1992 with my wife, our crappy car, and a shiny new degree in Fine Arts, the whole world was ahead of me. Reality set in hard. 1992 was the tail end of the recession. Even in good times, an Art degree is a tough sell for a job. Within three months of moving out here, we found ourselves in line at the food bank at one of the churches in the University District. They provided us our first Thanksgiving meal. Needless to say, we were broke. The dream of a College education leading to a career seemed an elusive lie. But I always tried to keep in mind what I consider the single most important piece of advice I learned in college. We had a grim career fair at the end of our Senior year. Students who had graduated gave talks, mostly about how they still did not have jobs. Realizing things were not going as planned, the professor chimed in and said “If I can give you one piece of advice in these times it is this: never stop learning.”

After three years of wandering from house painter, to Kindergarten enrichment teacher, to a brief stint in a Masters program, which ironically led me to being a janitor (how does that happen?), I landed a job as Display Coordinator in the Marketing Department at the University Bookstore. Around that time a little phenomenon was starting called the World Wide Web. It felt like this could be something. I remembered that advice to never stop learning. It was very handy to work in a bookstore with an employee discount. I picked up this book and started reading.

I read book after book about anything I could find on designing and writing front end code for the web. I learned by doing. I coded the front end of the bookstore’s site with Notepad as my only development tool. Animated gifs and trucker hats were in style. I landed a job at Blue Nile in 2000, during its first year in existence. Unfortunately, it was also the year of the .com bust. Company after company closed. Just days before my one year anniversary, I was let go as part of a 30 percent reduction in force. Goodbye, stock options! That said, working at a startup is an experience I will never forget. I highly recommend it. The end of that job led to the next phase in my career: Microsoft.

I have worked on amazing products with incredibly smart people over the last 10+ years at Microsoft. Maps, apps, ads, developer tooling. One of the first open source projects at Microsoft. A feature involving a unicorn that led to my name included on a patent. No wait, scratch the unicorn, that was only in my April Fool’s Day design.

I will admit there was the occasional awful project. But still. I have been offered incredible opportunities to grow both my knowledge about design and my career. I have no regrets.

But that mountain is still outside my front door. I see it every morning.

So, today I put on my hiking shoes and I climbed that mountain with my Microsoft badge in hand. I carried it with me to remind me of the journey I have been on, and to remind me that there are always more mountains to climb.

On Friday June 16, I will be turning in my blue badge and starting out on a new journey with Unity. I will miss the friends I have made at Microsoft. But I am excited for what lies ahead and what new things I will learn.

Never stop climbing and never stop learning...