Making ideas tangible - Personal blog about work, life, and learning
If attention to detail isn’t visible in your product, it’s hard to say you care about the details. What is in your heart doesn’t count. Values on a slide don’t count. A team that talks about craft while shipping something that looks unattended is not a team that displays care – not in a...
I flubbed an interview question the other day. Not because I gave a wrong answer, exactly, but because I gave a truthful answer that was too narrow, possibly not suited to the company, and not representative of what I would do were I hired. The fateful question <blockquot...
Building is easy, taste is hard. That line’s been going around design and engineering circles for a while now, and it’s true – for a team. A single designer with good instincts can make fast, sound “taste” calls all day. But a team can’t run on one person’s taste, and it can’t run on group vib...
Danielle asks: Does anyone have experience doing research on design systems? Specifically, validating existing components? Would love to learn from anyone who has done something similar, or could point me to resources like articles, etc. There are three...
Ideas are cheap. Every designer I’ve managed has had three ideas by mid-morning. If your org’s problem is “we don’t have enough ideas,” that’s easy to fix: creativity is a muscle, and a muscle needs reps. Generate a lot, including bad ones, and the good ones show up more often. That part is tr...
When a developer isn’t sure which button variant to use for a destructive action, they can ask. They can search Slack, check Storybook, peek into the codebase, or ask someone nearby. An agent composing UI on the fly isn’t going to ask. It’s going to work from what you give it – componen...
In the old system, quality required specification and inspection. You wrote down what “good” looked like: every state, every edge case, every pixel. Or at least every one you could think of. Then you built. Then you checked whether the thing matched what you wrote. This method was logic...
There’s a story going around that AI is squeezing designers out. That faster build cycles mean less room for design process. That when anyone can generate a working UI in an afternoon, the UX role shrinks to quality control at best. I’ve heard this from hiring managers who are genuinely...
A product team needed to decide if and how to provide a little convenience around an API Name when their user enters a Display Name . Small interaction, lots of edge cases: when does auto-fill stop? What if the user clears the API field? What if they edit it o...
Last month I shipped an iOS app . I designed it, wrote the code (with the help of Claude), got it through App Store review, and published a blog post about what it taught me about designing a solid onboarding experience. I’m a UX ...
The first thing you do in Monotasker is tap a checkbox. No tutorial, no tour. And no permissions granted yet. Just the thing you’ll tap every time you use the app. That first tap fires the iOS Reminders permission dialog. ...
These notes assume you’ve read the process documentation. What follows is the harder-to-document stuff: the principles, the traps, and the moves. The facilitator’s role Your job is to be a warm, trusted guide with enough authority to keep things moving and enough energy to keep...
A Concept Sprint is a short, usually week-long, in-person exercise meant to accelerate high-level exploration of a new area of development, a significant problem, or a strategic initiative. A blended team – product, design, architecture, engineering, marketing, and any truly relevant business ...
The case for human interfaces becoming obsolete is getting more sophisticated. It used to be “AI will do everything” – easy to dismiss. Now it sounds like Matt Webb’s recent piece on headless architecture : services need to expos...
Last year I wrote about a first batch of “hidden” pages on this site – RSS feeds, a technologies list, the changelog, etc. Those are mostly about consuming or documenting the project. Here are three more URLs in the sam...
A good problem statement is Factual : based on actual customer knowledge Specific : we can name examples of the customers who have this problem the pain caused by the problem bonus: things these customers do to tr...
What do you do when an executive brings you a prototype they vibe-coded that they are super-excited about? “Let’s talk about your aims behind this, what it’s meant to accomplish, how it does that” Note that is not just the appropriate response to an exe...
Sometimes you have to spend the time. Sometimes the agent won’t converge on your idea. Sometimes it’s the wrong tool for the job. <img src="/assets/images/2026/take-over.jpg" alt="Side-by-side square graphics labeled "Claude" and "Me": each shows a red telescope and ...
I recently rediscovered John Perry Barlow’s Principles of Adult Behavior . The Silicon Valley visionary and founder of the EFF died in 2018. In 1977 he wrote this list of principles for himself and asked his friends to hold him to them: Be patient. No matter what. <li...
When you author colors in OKLCH , you are using a space with a larger gamut than sRGB . <a href="https://readtech.org/ACCESSIBILITY/AP...