... so as I was saying. I don't actually remember. It's been a while since I had enough to say to write it down on the internet. Probably not as long as the archives here make it look, but that's all I could find of my old writing that I faithfully entrusted to Medium and other "The Place for your writing to build an audience" from the 2010s. Lesson learned. All of this is published here first. Lets just dig into the big overused trope here labeled "FAQs" and see what we got...
"The site hasn't changed very much... does the home page say you're still at Apple? LinkedIn says you're not..."
That's true, imaginary questioner, very good and handsome question. New site is in the works but I wanted to be able to start writing as soon as possible and that required a whole bunch of updating super out of date NPM packages and all kinds of fun things on the command line and changing the font-weight of my semi-colons in my 11ty config files because I was two versions behind, stuff like that. (Also I was using JQuery for the menu for some reason? I have no idea what whatever version of me built this site originally in 2017 was thinking at the time.) Also I changed hosts, which was a bit of work too. You'd be surprised how much work it is to make your site updatable while still making it look like it hasn't been updated in 4 years.
"Why did you stop writing a regular blog? Or posting on social media? I used to follow you on Twitter and you don't even have an account there anymore?"
Twitter is a nazi bar now, so no I don't. I stopped posting to social media originally because of work restrictions on what I could post about, it was just easier to say nothing than try to make sure I didn't say something I wasn't supposed to. It turns out "These tweets do not represent the views of my employer" isn't the iron clad liability shield we all thought it was, according to the company lawyers I talked to about it before I stopped. Who knew? (We all did, that's who knew.) After a few years of not doing social media or writing and publishing it, I fell out of the habit. I also didn't feel like I had anything to say that wasn't being said over and over again. Now I do (I hope.)
If you found this on Bluesky or LinkedIn, welcome, thank you for validating my hypothesis that people would click a link I posted there to read something here. In all seriousness though, I am very delighted you're here.
"What are you going to be writing about now that you've set up your blog to look like you've neglected it for years? Is it going to be about AI? I hear that's the future of everything!"
Hey, first of all imaginary questioner, looks aren't everything. Secondly, I'm not going to be directly writing about "AI" by which I assume you mean Generative AI tools like LLMs and Diffusion models. There are plenty of people who are writing about that and how you can get up at 4am to use their AI generated routine to hustle 10x more. That's not me. I'm sure AI will come up because we're all swimming in it if you work anywhere near a project that is about making software, or interacting with humans, or if you have a job that is supposedly going to be replaced in the next "few years." (It probably won't be, or at least if some piece of software does take your job, it probably won't be any good at it.)
The last time I was writing seriously I was running design teams inside tech companies and writing about how to do that without losing your mind or being a dick. I don't run teams anymore (at least not officially, they always pull you back in unofficially when you can do the work for free.) I've spent the last three years being a work-a-day "IC" designer, although I am what a couple recruiters and thought-leaders have called a "Super Senior Designer" which is really cool and not at all anxiety inducing when you were being made to feel like a senior citizen by your peers in Silicon Valley when you were in your mid-30s. What it means is that I am both keeping an eye on the strategic direction of the work and also doing the work. I am mentoring designers and engineers (I'm a design technologist, I have a foot in both worlds) but I'm not reporting to HR about them. I'm doing the part of the manager work I really loved, while also getting to make stuff. Also my "areas of expertise" are design systems, accessibility (a11y), and being a design technologist (aka a designer who's developer skills are constantly overrated when the engineers make someone mad.)
That's what I'm going to write about here (mostly, who knows were the parenthetical tangents will take us) because I think designers at every level can start practicing the things that will one day make them "Super Senior" too when they are barely middle-aged.
"What's with all the (random comments in parentheses?)"
It's my writing style, or at least it's the style that closest matches the way I talk and think. I'm sure all my writing teachers over the years (there were many, and I love them all for what they taught me) would cringe if they saw me overusing them, but I'm not worried about it for two reasons.
- They probably won't read this unless you tell them, so you know... let's keep it a secret between us
- In a world that is filling up with automatically generated text that sounds like the offspring of your most boring marketing professor and the worst LinkedIn post you've ever read, I wanted to make sure what I am writing is worth reading stylistically as well. That means I'm gonna try to keep it light, hopefully it will make you laugh along the way, or at least smile and remember that this thing we do is serious, but we don't have to take ourselves too seriously while we do it.
"Are all of your posts going to be answering questions you just made up and pretended someone was asking you?"
Probably not? I mean, this is not the first time I've done this bit. If you, a real human person, has a question or something you think I should write about click one of the contact methods in the footer directly below this sentence and let me know.