Fred has always believed that the best engineers are the ones with the richest lives outside of engineering. The discipline required to master a martial art, the precision of horology, the controlled chaos of freefall — these are not distractions from the work. They are the experiences that make the work better, that train the mind to see systems where others see randomness and to find calm in complexity.
Every pursuit teaches the same lesson differently: mastery is not a destination but a practice, renewed every single day.
Beginning at age five, martial arts has been the longest continuous thread in Fred's life — longer even than software. The practice has shaped his approach to everything: the respect for fundamentals, the patience required for incremental improvement, and the understanding that true mastery is measured in decades, not milestones.
With more than ten thousand jumps logged, Fred's relationship with skydiving goes well beyond the recreational. At that level, every jump is a study in risk management, spatial awareness, and the kind of calm decision-making that only comes from doing something enough times to transcend fear entirely. The parallels to high-stakes engineering are not metaphorical — they are direct.
The study and craft of timekeeping speaks to something fundamental in the engineering temperament: the beauty of mechanisms where every component serves a purpose, where tolerance is measured in fractions of a millimeter, and where the interplay of simple parts produces emergent complexity. Horology is engineering as art form.
The open road as meditation. Two wheels, engine vibration, and the kind of present-moment awareness that resets a busy mind.
Creating tangible objects in a digital world. The satisfaction of joinery, the grain of the wood, and the permanence of something built by hand.
Reading a room, building tension, releasing it. The live performance as real-time systems thinking with an audience as feedback loop.
A lifelong appreciation for sound and composition, from the structure of classical to the improvisation of jazz. Music as the universal language of pattern and emotion.