Designer, coder, systems thinker. Born in Mongolia, based in the DC metro.

My story isn't like someone's ordinary story.

I studied Heavy Duty Mechanical Engineering back in 1998. By then I started interested in web in general. How it's built, how it works. There were not enough materials to learn in Mongolian language. Also, computer accessibility was another problem. In our college there was a computer lab, very few desktop computers with Windows 97, 98. Students would draw on MS Paint. Internet access was very limited.

So I walked from Construction Polytechnic College to Nuclear Research Center to access the internet. Self-taught HTML, then MS FrontPage, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and so on. I walked there 9 months, almost every day. It took me 1.5 hours to get there, 2 hours 20 minutes to get back. I usually got off by midnight. Research center last employees leave at midnight. So I get out there and walk back home.

The 9 months paid off about a month before my college graduation. I saw an ad in a local newspaper — hiring a web designer in Beijing, China. My curiosity was at the high. I went to meet the hiring manager. We talked a little bit, they gave me a test on the coding side of MS FrontPage. That was the easiest test for me. I was writing my code on MS DOS screens, so FrontPage was the simple version of that. I passed the test. They offered me a job. I had to decide: go to China right away, or stay at college and finish. I left college and pursued the IT journey in 1999.

2000, I co-founded Mongolia's first e-Commerce solution shop. We made our marks at the time. I helped build the majority of the tourism industry websites in Mongolia between 2000 and 2006. Almost everybody knew me at the time. 2004, I started my startup. Didn't go well. But it still exists on paper.

2008, I came to the US to get my Master's at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. 2009, I started freelancing in the US. And so on.