Terrance 'TMike' Brown

LA native. Learned to code hacking MMORPGs. Traded websites for tacos. Now building design systems at JP Morgan Chase.

I didn't take the traditional path into software engineering. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles. I was always glued to the computer — not for homework, but for escape. I spent nights on Ventrilo servers gaming and talking with all types of people. Some of them were developers, and somewhere along the way, I began dipping my toe into computing through hacking the games I was playing. Nothing malicious — I was just finding exploits, breaking bending systems, and figuring out how things worked under the hood.

My Ventrilo friends eventually told me to do something productive with my skills. So I did. I started building websites for local restaurants in exchange for free meals. One site became two, two became ten, and then I figured it would make senese to pivot into undertaking a small business. Today, I'm a frontend engineer at JP Morgan Chase, building design systems and component libraries used across 15+ business units. I've created AI-powered tools that save my team 200+ engineering hours monthly. I care deeply about accessibility, clean code, and building things that make other developers' lives easier.

The input path was unconventional, but the output is the same: I like understanding how systems work — and making them work better. When I'm not coding, I'm on the pickleball court, hunting for good craft beer, or gaming with friends. Some things never change.