I worked as a foreign dealer at a casino in Vancouver.

Every night, guests from all over the world sat at my table. I shuffled chips, dealt cards, traded jokes with them. It was a scene I would never have run into in a normal Korean office life. Honestly, it was pretty fun.

About two years in, a quiet doubt started showing up.

In the end, my job was to take money from the people sitting across the table from me. And the better I got at it, the more clearly I felt that the value I was creating and the reward I received were not lining up.

Years later, I finally found a single line for that feeling I couldn't name at the time.

There is work that wears down the more you do it, and work that spreads the more you do it.

From that point on, I started looking for work with a different grain.

Not work that took from someone, but work that added to someone. Work where what you made once didn't disappear, work that reached more people as time went on. That's the kind of work I wanted.

The answer was development.

If I built a product once, that product could help someone with their work even while I was asleep. It reached people even when I wasn't there, and it could reach more of them over time.

The first time I saw a small product I had built actually being used by someone, that crack, the one that grew sharper the faster my hands moved at the casino table, started to fade.

I wrapped things up in Vancouver and came back to Korea.

One day at Kyobo Bookstore, I picked up a Sudoku book out of curiosity. Solving Sudoku in code made me want to learn more about development. I studied on my own for a while, then went deeper by joining a bootcamp.

Inside that bootcamp the interest hardened, and that's how my development career began.