The other weekend, I got second place 🥈 in my category at Helvellyn Sky Ultra – a fairly technical 60 km ultramarathon in the Lake District (see video) with around 4,000 m of elevation. I’m nowhere near being a professional runner – or even a particularly fast one. But after 15 years of running ultras and building products, I’ve noticed that the best outcomes in both tend to share three…
My wife's niece sells jewellery at markets in Havana – no card payments, no reliable internet, blackouts stretching past 30 hours. Her business ran on pen and paper. So I spent a weekend building her a simple offline Android POS. Personal software, audience of one, built with the world's most advanced AI to run on a decade-old phone.
AI has accelerated the quiet shift in how de design products. Prototypes are replacing decks, behaviour is becoming the new UX, and pull requests are eating the handoff. These are my observations of what’s changing and the one thing that isn’t.
A good prototype can illustrate product vision, prove technical feasibility, let you experience the journey, and evoke emotion through UI design and animation – all at once. A slide deck can usually only do one of these well before it starts diluting the narrative or disappearing into the weeds. Prototypes don’t just explain – they persuade.
2025 was a proper roller coaster. It started quite depressingly with Normally going insolvent and ended on a super high – I designed, built and shipped more than I thought was remotely possible – agents, children's finance, evidence platform, AI in drug discovery, and government trust work.
Speculation time! Are LLMs with their chain-of-thought capabilities opening the door to a new disruption – Capability as a Service? Imagine Siri accessing your company's API directly, no app installation required.
Most engineers now use AI at work, half have incorporated it in applications. From code-writing assistants to knowledge searching, reviewing code, and creating content or graphics for documentation, AI has woven itself into our workflows seamlessly.
Platforms that bring a simplified, more delightful developer experience are becoming the preferred way of hosting web applications.
Front-end Frameworks and UI Libraries Have Commoditised UX & UI Design Pretty much everyone is now using one of the modern declarative, component-based front-end frameworks and UI libraries. But here’s the flip side: as frameworks and libraries continue to democratise good design, the distinctiveness of apps and services is slowly being lost.
Over the last 10 years, there has been a huge expansion of javascript AI/ML libraries that enable embedding AI into client-side bundles and serverless functions and cater for various use cases. This article lists a few of the ones I found most useful by their uses.
While decidedly technical, the new updates showcased are making it easier and easier to create great and performant user experiences with Nuxt without needing to spend hours on boilerplate, configurations or event handlers. By combining these with a powerful LLM, I believe many non-coding designers might start tipping their toes in the prototyping with code water. I’m very excited about what this…
This Christmas, I crafted a hybrid escape room experience for my parents, blending real-world challenges with a touch of AI magic. Imagine a gift not just wrapped in paper, but wrapped in a journey through AI-driven puzzles and digital enigmas.
Building prototypes and apps is fun. Dealing with certificates and provisioning admin is not. I've written this guide for anyone going through the same frustrations as me, trying to package up, code-sign, notarize and share a Vue.js + Electron.js app on a Mac-os (Ventura 13.3). I hope it helps.
An interaction designer's view on solving some of the basic charging challenges for EVs Our Kia Niro EV parked at the trailhead in the Mountains of Slovenia … after driving 2000 miles across Europe from London TLDR Although range has not caused me any real anxiety yet (read Part 1 ), what surprised me most about owning an electric car is that there are some pretty basic (and some not so basic)…
An interaction designer's view on driving an electric car – the Fiat e500 over 1000 miles around UK
Photo Petar Lupic Istria by UTMB, over 100 miles with 6500+ meters of elevation gain. An ultra-trail world tour championship race, now qualifier for the UTMB itself. The event with over 2000 runners attending, of which 280 or so doing the “red” route (100 miles). 40 elites, 60 drop-outs at the end. Amazing day out with time of 26h and 11min. 6th place in my category, 24th overall. Labin Bukovo…
Context On February the 25th I attempted the South Wales Traverse as a long training run for the upcoming 100 miles of Istria race. The plan was to run 120km with 5500m of elevation gain across the whole of Brecon Beacons National Park covering all the peaks above 600m along the way. Welsh weather had other plans 🤦♂️ Start It all started so well. Clear weather forecast, on-time departure and a…
The weird race in the middle of Wales, where a little over thousand runners try to outrun a few over sixty horses, must be one of the most intense runs I’ve done. Can a man outrun a horse? Yes, I’ve outrun 32 of them. Can a man outrun all the horses? Not this year. However, it has happened twice in history of the race. Although not as long as some of the ultras I ran, this race has a similar raw…
This Easter I decided to go on a two day bikepacking trip from Slovenj Gradec to Idrija , via Ljubelj pass, Bled, Soriska planina and Most na Soci. On the way back I stoped in Ljubljana, Radomlje and continued across Jezersko pass. For anyone interested, I would highly recommend this route as you will get to experience the long flat planes in Austria and Slovenia, steep mountain passes, amazing…
K24 – Koroski Hribovski Izziv – is the Slovenian equivalent of the famous 3 Peaks Challenge in UK. OK, perhaps a bit harder. However, I've decided to do the K24 with a twist – treat it a bit more like the Bob Graham Round – and try to run the route in under 16 hours. About K24 K24 Counter-clockwise route: Elevation profile from left to right shows Peca, Govca, Raduha, Komen, Smrekovec, Sleme,…