I learned to code through HTML tutorials saved on my laptop. The web was where I first encountered magic: save a file, refresh, and something you made appears in the browser.
I met Chrome DevTools as a teenager through a tutorial on “how to hack your grades”. It didn’t work since the changes were gone on refresh — yet I fell in love with the idea of being able to see and play with the source code of any website I visit on the web. From then on, DevTools became a companion through every stage of my career.
Around university, I was at Zeplin, helping designers and developers build beautiful products. I've used DevTools every day, and started wondering if I could contribute to it. I spent some evenings going through the Chromium bug tracker, looking for something I could fix. Once I found a small CSS Shadow Editor issue, I sent a CL, and eventually saw my name added to the AUTHORS file. It felt like a small fingerprint on something I loved. The people building DevTools and the web were like heroes, and I wanted to be one of them.
A few years later, I joined Google in Munich on a different team — partly because I knew the DevTools team was there. It sounds too convenient to be true, but sometimes life has good writing. I loved the team I joined, met beautiful people and got to learn and grow at a scale I couldn't have imagined, but the pull was still there.
One day, when we were booking desks, a familiar face from the DevTools team ended up sitting across from me. I'd been following his tweets for years. I emailed him, we grabbed coffee, and he found me some 20% tasks I could do alongside my main work. When a position opened, I sent a passionate email on how much I loved the web platform and DevTools. I got in! It really felt like getting called up to play alongside the players whose posters were on my wall.
Since then, I’ve worked on many parts of Chrome DevTools: from the elements panel to the animations panel and from the AI assistance panel to the MCP server. I loved the product, and fixing issues felt like helping a friend out!
The people I once saw as heroes became my teammates, my mentors and my friends. I got to meet the faces behind the product, and loved every one of them. Going to the office became not only for working together, but also for meeting with friends. Some of us gathered at my place to hang out till late and to mix music. They even showed up to my first ever DJ gig!
Thanks to everyone on the team, I've become the person and the engineer I am today. I’m grateful for the time I had at Google, on the team, for all the things we've built and for all the friendships we've made.
I'm not going very far and my aim is still the same: help people build beautiful products on the web. I believe I'll still be using Chrome DevTools day to day. The difference now is that I know where to create bug reports, who to ping and, even better, who to send my fix CLs for review.
So long, and thanks for all the fish — yes, the actual fish. It's time to cook!