Design leadership, software, photography art, music and other likeminded good things.
With AI tools there's more software shipping more than ever. The thread across my talks with other leaders are consistently being told to scale beyond adding headcount. The model of the trifecta and design being embedded in every piece of work on a single roadmap just isn't scaling for this new world. If we don't adapt we end up being either overwhelmed with work or only overseeing part of the…
Tools over problems I've been thinking this week about how addictive it is with these new tools to be able to build things without so much of the friction. The danger of that is falling in love with the effort and interactions over solving the problem. This is partly because of Karl Koch's piece on falling in love with the build , which is about the dangerous little pleasure of making something…
I tried a new hobby this week, making chocolate bonbons. Painted the moulds with cocoa butter I bought a few colours, shelled them with tempered chocolate, filled them with curd and sealed the whole thing with another layer. It was fiddly and messy, I did Apple and blackcurrant for the first batch, then a lemon that came out wincingly sharp against sweet Belgian chocolate. I made quite a few…
I am notoriously bad at building habits. Cycling lasted six months despite two bikes. So the two zeros in this numbering system are entirely optimistic. Welcome to the first Unrequired Reading where I share my enthusiasms and how I become engrossed. Reading more Two changes since my phone started running my life. First: no phones at the bedside. Waking at 3am was leading to surprise purchases and…
Git Blog is on the App Store now. If you run a static site from a GitHub repo, you know how it goes. Write markdown, commit, run local branch, push, let the generator build. It works well, but it's tied to a laptop. I wanted a way to publish from my phone that committed directly to my repo. The existing markdown, folder structure, and Git workflow untethered from the desk. So I built ...Git Blog.…
This was an open letter to my team about improving our AI maturity in a structured way. Thanks to Ben, Ryan, Danielle, Sierre, Laurel and Dave for your input and council on this. Team, I’m writing this as a note to our future selves, and as an invitation to be deliberate about how we get there. For a long time, I’ve described design as a spectrum: art on one end (craft, emotion, interaction…
Incredible staging and a better than I remember watching it over ten years ago.
2025 was a difficult year for me. There was loss, change, and a sense of things not quite settling. There were good moments too. A meaningful trip to Norway with my parents. Creative work that kept me engaged. New tools at work that shifted how I think about making. But overall it was a year that asked more than it gave. Looking back, a lot of it comes down to doing things with my hands and…
For tools built on systems with vast capabilities, the interaction model of AI is remarkably narrow. It expects users to already know what’s possible, how to ask for it, and how to guide a model through ambiguity. This is a high cognitive load for beginners and an inefficient loop for experienced users. Worse, it discourages exploration. If AI is magic, it's assumed you're a magician. Start with…
It's easy to get caught up in the daily pace of people management, one on ones, project meetings and check ins. But your effectiveness as a leader has less to do with what happens daily and more to do with your self-awareness of how and what you're focusing on. Shifting sands Everything changes around you. The company scales, your role evolves, and suddenly you're navigating relationships with…
It's important to have an ethos, some core principles that drive who you are. It's also important to make them short and pithy for those that have short attention spans. Dreaming for the future and building for today. Vision for a cake and strategy for a slice, preparing for it to sit nicely next to the other slices but iterating faster where things need to change shape. Don't wait for the future…
I'm just back from spending two weeks in Toronto for work, it was cold and I mostly spent time in the hotel, coffee shop and office or briskly walking between them. I did manage to get out super early before work to take some photos. At the start of the year we picked up Captain, a cute striped and spotted silver British Shorthair. After Bear passed away in November the house felt empty so it…
Fifteen years into the iPad era, I’ve been mulling over my perfect device that feels almost like an iPad but isn’t. It’s not everyone‘s cup of tea, and probably will never be for the mass market, but for those quiet Sunday afternoons, it’s my dream device. Right now, my devices fight for my attention. My iPhone distracts me at every turn (Slack notifications, advert pushes etc), my iPad is often…
Overall this year is floating around the 3 star mark. There were some great highlights I'll go into but massively overshadowed by family illness and upheaval and the loss of Bear my much loved cat. Photography was a big part of my year, I got a new camera and went on several workshops and trips enjoying both the moment and capturing it. I took photos of deer , hot air balloons , the grand canyon ,…
As designers in the trifecta model (your balance of engineering, product management and design might be called something else), it can often feel like we’re in a constant state of reaction, adjusting to new feasibility discussions from engineering or responding to product management around viability or change in scope. More often than not, we champion or create positive change, but we can’t…
At the weekend I rented a ridiculously sized Fuji 100-600mm lens and went on a workshop in Holkham Deer Park. Dressed in a camoflaging cagoule and waterproof boots I ventured into the park along with a few other photographers to find my adventure was more tame than expected, the deer were in the car park. Eventually we found some other groups further into the park and I finally got the shot I…
First trip in September was to Denver, I didn't take many photos because it was a work trip but the Union Station was really nice. For September the weather was great, I did however only see a tiny glimpse of mountains. Okay it wasn't Dereham but it was close, I just like the alliteration. The rest of my travel was to a tiny little cabin in the woods. It was in the grounds of Houghton Hall, the…
4:30am is a time I generally only see if I have to go to Heathrow. This time I wasn't boarding a flight I was trying to photograph ten. Old Buckingham has a yearly balloon festival and after seeing a photo on instagram I booked tickets right away for early the next morning. Hot air balloons can be very fickle and with a modicum of wind they cannot take off. As a bit of luck the one morning I…
Pico do Areeiro is one of the highest peaks of Madeira (1800m), it's touristy and crowded but an incredible experience feeling the clouds roll at your feet. Levada do Caldeirão Verde is a walk through the islands interior jungle-esk Queimadas Forest Park. We barely did the beginning of this trail and still it was beautiful.
A quick three days for work in Vancouver and some exploring downtown. Vancouver strikes me as one of those cities where you need a day and a car to really appreciate it, for that reason I wasn't too enamoured. I actually only saw daylight through a hotel conference room window so it's still on my list to really explore.
I love my X100V it's the perfect travel camera but it made me curious for much larger focal ranges. So a trip to the local camera shop and I bought a preowned XT-4 along with a 56mm (for the camera nerds this is equivilent to 85mm full frame). I then had a walk around the city and found how wildly different shooting with an almost zoom lens is. The XT-4 has so many more possibilities but it's also…
It was a stressful Christmas with my cat getting an infection, stopping eating which led to hospitalisation. We found he has cronic kidney disease and his kidney function is down to a quarter of what it's supposed to be. We went from thinking we might have days left to months. Still hard not to see him as a kitten.
Boring best wishes or unimaginative thanks, why not try one of these to add a bit of personality. I am not responsible for you coming across weird when using one of these. Bish, bash, bosh, In this economy!? Viscerally yours, All the smiles, And that for now is everything, Be well, Revolving round the sun, Godspeed, Fair Winds and following seas, Trying, Obsessively, Good hunting, Stay hydrated,…
This was a rapidly disapearing year of getting back into the swing of travelling, crowds and things outside the house. I'm excited for next year to bring more conferences, cycling, radio broadcasting and adventure but also not too much. Starting a radio show on Future Radio 10/10 Visiting a glacier in Iceland 10/10 Exploring Reykjavik, Chicago, Toronto (twice), Palm Springs, London, Amsterdam, and…
I wake up in the morning later than I want to, head to the kitchen and make coffee – it's a simple task I undertake every morning. The technicalities of this process are complex and reliant on multiple parties like power, transformers, water, having purchased coffee or filters. You'd assume all I want in this experience of making coffee is predicability. Predictability is foundational to good user…
As a leader steering your team in the right direction while dealing with daily challenges is incredibly hard to scale without a deliberate plan. You might have a company mission or a product vision, this is a focused view to delivering a great user experience with a high functioning design team. A vision is the view when you get there, strategy is the deliberate planned journey. In order to align…
In an interview the common question that comes up is about my leadership style, my answer is about how interchangeable the communication methods are but how there are consistent elements. Not all of these are about how you people manage but they are some great approaches to become a better leader. In no particular order... Understand that your job now has several parts that are self defined and…