Seth Medina

I didn't come to engineering through a classroom. I was homeschooled through twelfth grade, and my first real job was on the floor of a fast casual poke restaurant in Orlando. I showed up shy and unable to hold a knife properly; four years later I was running weekend shifts and helping train new franchisees, in a loud room where problems show up in real time. That's where I learned to read people, to push them honestly, and to find the gap: the one missing piece that, once you name it, makes everything else move. I started teaching myself Python in 2022, on nights and weekends. Toward the end of that year a mentor at Merchant Service Depot's parent company took me on, patient enough to let me break things, and steered me to what the business actually ran on: PHP and JavaScript. Payments came with it: gateways, card issuing, merchant acquiring, the unglamorous plumbing money actually runs on. Today I'm VP of Engineering at Merchant Service Depot, leading a senior team across a unified payments platform and the AI tooling around it. The tools I build on my own time lean the same direction: local first, no accounts, no telemetry, nothing that competes for your attention. rotli keeps your notes as plain files in a folder you own. uNotch shows your AI usage from the edge of the screen. Honu lets you draw over your screen on a call and leaves nothing behind when you're done. Aetheria renders wallpapers in your browser and never uploads a thing. I like software that respects the person using it. The one that breaks the pattern is SE!ZE online, and it breaks it on purpose: a board game only comes alive with someone across the table, so that one lives online and is built for the people who show up to play. I grew up playing chess with my grandpa, and the love of a sharp, competitive board game never left. SE!ZE is just the one that has me right now. Away from the keyboard I'm a husband, a father of two boys, and a follower of Christ. There's more in More about me: life at home, what I believe, and who I look up to.

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