Hi there! I'm Jeremi. Back in 2013, I was living at my grandmother's house in South Central Los Angeles. This photo shows the bedroom desk where I spent most of my time tinkering with ideas and facing life's challenges. After graduating from USC, I was working three different part-time jobs and felt an urgent need to create. On weekends, my girlfriend and I would paint, but deep down, I knew I wasn't where I wanted to be in life.

One day, I decided to try something different. I had a burned copy of Adobe Illustrator on my laptop and started playing around with the pen tool. But that wasn't enough. I wanted to code and build things. That's when I heard about General Assembly and enrolled in their Web development course. I teamed up with classmates who were in a similar situation - living with their parents but wanting more. We had late-night coding sessions, had fun, and pushed each other to grow.

After completing my first contract as a UX Designer in mid-2014, I took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco with less than $100 in my bank account. The reason? I reached out to someone on Twitter for a UX job. On the same day, I had an interview and attended a General Assembly hiring event, where I spoke with people from startups.

The next day, I went to a couple of interviews for front-end developer positions. Unfortunately, I didn't do well in the technical interviews, but the same people encouraged me to keep pushing forward and continue learning. Although I felt discouraged, I saw it as a sign to stay in the game.

While I didn't land a job, I celebrated taking a bet on myself with my uncle Chema in Sac town. We went on a road bike ride, which turned out to be not the best idea. I ended up with road rash on my ass, and I have a picture to remember the moment.

I've been working in tech for almost a decade, working at companies like Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Salesforce and LinkedIn. I've got a family and I traveled to a lot of dope places. Looking back, in every season, I was blessed to have the community I needed which gave me the personal and professional support to discover the human being I'm meant to become. Working in the field of design has been a journey of self discovery.

I see that the struggles, self doubts and fears were all a part of the process of understanding the human nature of being creative. No matter how high I've gone, those feelings have remained. But I've learned to not allow those feelings to disable me from what I feel called to do. Whether that means speaking up for my teams, advocating for users or for people who look like me.

Now I want to help others discover their own true nature with some of the tools I was blessed to have passing on the information I learned over my time in the industry. Which is why I created a platform like this. By reading through some of my story, my hope is to help others in a similar situation like I was, to see that those moments build toward something beautiful than what your own vision may physically see at the time being. Every challenging time has a lesson. Be patient, have grace for your self and others. Keep fighting for you and yours.

Much love, Jeremi Dudu