Call me shallow if you want. I've made peace with it.
Among all the things a website can do, what pulls me in the most is interaction — the small, obsessive kind. A button that resists your cursor for a split second before it gives in. A hover state that feels alive. That's the stuff that gets me.
Looking for a hard skill
I studied social science, and like a lot of people from non-technical majors, I spent my university years chasing extracurriculars — campaigns, student ambassador programs, that kind of thing. Most of that work came down to making videos or card-news graphics, and every single time, the hardest part was finding someone who could actually design or edit. I got tired of depending on other people's skills, so I started learning bits of it myself.
That's when a quieter fear set in: if I don't build something of my own, I'll always be replaceable. So I stopped staying in my lane. I tried things I never would have touched before — building a robot, appearing in a promo video, anything that might accidentally reveal an aptitude I didn't know I had.
That's how I met development.
It wasn't clean code that hooked me. It was watching something I imagined become a real, working thing — and then watching someone else actually use it. That feeling was borderline addictive. I decided on the spot: I'd give myself two years to make it as a developer.
An on-and-off relationship with code
For a long time, the question in my head was "am I even allowed to call myself a developer?" I kept going anyway, because I'd already set the timeline and I wasn't going to break it early.
Somewhere along the way, that question quietly resolved itself — not because I got confident, but because I stopped needing the answer. What I have now with development is closer to a complicated relationship than a clean love story. Some days I feel like I'm terrible at this and sink into it. Other days I solve something I've been stuck on for a while, and it feels like winning the whole world. What keeps me here is the process itself: forming a hypothesis, testing it, adjusting, and slowly getting somewhere — and writing it all down so I can see, in hindsight, that I actually moved forward.
Then a different kind of fear showed up
Last year, a new question replaced the old one: what if AI makes my seat disappear entirely?
I went looking for answers in an unlikely place — philosophy books, journaling, just trying to figure out what I actually liked, independent of what the job market wanted from me. Not big questions. Small ones too, down to which pastry shape I preferred. I filled a notebook fast.
Somewhere in all that writing, I ran into something I'd been quietly ignoring: I really, genuinely love pretty things.
I'd dabbled in Three.js once, just for fun. Looking back, I always liked beautiful things — I just kept putting that interest last. While other developers gravitated toward logic and optimization, I was the one obsessing over CSS. But I never let myself take it seriously, because I couldn't see how "caring about interactions" would translate into anything hireable. For a while, that made me feel like the odd one out — everyone else caring about clean architecture, and me hovering my mouse over a website just to watch it respond.
*Finding out I wasn't the only one
*
Admitting that obsession out loud opened a door: I discovered the term Design Engineer.
Realizing there were people out there who thought the way I did — genuinely, not as a hobby — felt like being handed permission I didn't know I needed.
I wasn't sure what a Design Engineer actually did, though, and searching in Korean didn't get me far. So I switched to English and found articles from teams at Vercel, Adobe, and others. I started translating the best ones into Korean and posting them on my blog — and then, somewhat nervously, reaching out to the original authors to ask if that was okay. I ended up translating more than ten pieces. The person I learned the most from was Sean Voisen, a design engineering lead at Adobe — his writing pushed me past "pretty" and into thinking seriously about UX and the philosophy underneath it.
One thing that surprised me: even people with "Design Engineer" in their title couldn't agree on a single definition. Some manage design systems. Some build the interaction layer. Everyone seemed to be building their own version of the role from scratch.
Building instead of just reading
Reading only gets you so far without something to show for it. So I started building small things — hover states, tiny interactions, nothing ambitious. It was, unreasonably, one of the happiest parts of my week. I also started keeping a running collection of design engineers whose work I admired, and eventually found the one whose taste felt like a north star for where I want to go.
Everyone in this space seems to chase a different kind of beauty — some lean minimal, some go all-in on shaders and spectacle. I don't know exactly where I land yet, but I keep coming back to wanting to capture everyday life in a browser. Lately that's meant small, slightly silly experiments — building a working traffic light, for instance, just to see if I could make it feel right.
Where this leaves me
It's a messy time, honestly. I'm drawn to a role that barely has open positions here in Korea, which makes me wonder if I'm being unrealistic. But chasing "Design Engineer" doesn't mean I'm dropping the fundamentals of frontend work — if anything, it means I need them more. The way I see it, a design engineer doesn't just build for end users; inside a design system, your fellow developers are users too. Making something your teammates can trust and reach for without thinking is not a nice-to-have — it's the job. And to do that well, I need to understand what it's actually like to build product day to day.
So — pretty things are still my favorite thing in the world. This is just where I'm starting to write about the road to becoming someone who gets to build them for a living.
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