Dantley Davis –– Vice President of Design and Research at Twitter –– was one of our speakers at AfroTech 2019. We sat down to talk to him about his life and what drives his work. Davis was born in Seoul, Korea, to an American Air Force member and a Korean woman. His father’s career as a crew chief for a fighter squadron would take him on frequent overseas assignments. On return from these trips, his father would bring back gifts like radios and other electronics from the countries he visited. At a young age, Davis started pulling the electronics apart and (mostly) successfully putting them back together. Seeking to nurture his son’s talents, his father bought him a computer at eight-years-old. On that computer, Davis taught himself how to program in Visual Basic and played PC video games. Over the next few years, the computer became his primary hobby. He would often crack the copy protection of PC video games to share with his friends, and he learned Photoshop so he could modify the...