Over the last eighteen years my focus has been on the web—designing and building custom interfaces and user experiences for everything from small startups to established products and large companies.
I have experience in product design, backend and frontend engineering, and particularly enjoy roles that intersect some or all of these disciplines. I am comfortable joining existing teams or leading my own. Currently, I am designing and building tools for design teams at LinkedIn.
A few clients and collaborative partners from a past life in client services:
The country chose darkness. A majority of voters looked right into racism, misogyny, and anti-queerness—on full display—and said to themselves, “Yes, that. I am choosing that. I have my reasons.”
Those of us that did not make that particular choice will spend months (years, actually, if not decades) re-litigating what “went wrong”, but I don’t think it’s actually that complicated. Even those that voted for this darkness under the “it won’t actually be that way” assumption, still made an active choice. And I don’t think we should write it off and try to explain it as frustration about—pick your pet issue: the economy, progressive values, etc.
You cannot ignore a bully without implicitly supporting them. You cannot ignore transphobia without supporting it. You cannot ignore the elimination of the rights of women without being in full support of taking away those rights. And you cannot ignore White Supremacy without offering it your support. These things must be called out. And a vote is an affirmative choice—an expression of support.
People are hurt. And hurt people do things that are selfish and yet—often, reliably—not in their own best interest. I understand that. But there has to be a line in society that even selfishness does not surpass. This year may or may not mark our country’s beginning dalliance with full-featured fascism; time will tell. But it absolutely shows the outcome of a culture that has become so individualistic that even the most basic tenants of a collective society no longer look attractive to these individuals—like the right to exist, to travel freely, and to have domain over our own bodies. It has become ok to nibble at the margins of those ideals, “because it doesn’t affect me”.
Yes, we have always been a country built on racism, a country late to grant rights to women, and a country that had to be drug by courts into some modicum of permissiveness toward queer existence1, but this election put it all on display—no dog whistles, no code to decipher—and the majority of people still said “yes” to all of it, with clarity. That breaks my heart. My personal disposition trends toward acknowledging the cynicism in our world, but I had actually hoped a majority of us knew better.
In 2016 my surprise led me to believe I didn’t understand the country I was living in. Now, sadly, in 2024, I believe I do.
🤟🏼 Three Things
The Work Is Never Done – On the same theme as this update, friend Naz Hamid has written a piece that’s well worth your time. A brief excerpt:
“The feeling of disbelief is a privilege.
“I’m not surprised. Disappointed and angry, yes. But not surprised. I’ve experienced racism enough times in this country and gone through a lengthy process with immigration to know what this country truly is. Ironically, the racism I’ve experienced has occurred in cities. And despite being heightened to it when traveling through smaller parts of this country, I haven’t knowingly experienced it. The racism is here, in our backyards.
“But this country is unlike any other. There are good people here, aiming to truly make the world a better place.” [Read]
My Project 2025 – Poet Saeed Jones is one of the hosts of the excellent podcast, Vibe Check. On their most recent episode, he read a poem that he’d written that day, in reflection on the election results. It’s beautiful and while you can read it, I highly recommend you listen to his own reading of it and the brief discussion afterward. It starts around the 49 minute mark (depending on the hellscape of dynamically-inserted ads in your download). The link should take you close to it. Also, Saeed is a great follow on Bluesky.
“I am god talking to herself. I am evicting
America from my body and making room
in the borders of my black bad bitch body
for everyone I was sent into this life
to love loudly.”[Listen]
“Appreciate everything, endlessly” – On a lighter, heartwarming note, Cabel Sasser’s talk from this year’s final XOXO Festival is the best 20 minutes you’ll spend on the internet today (or possibly any day). I was lucky enough to be in the audience for it and even in rewatching (several times!), I still get all the feels. Go into it with as little context as possible, but once you’ve watched it, be sure to check out the companion site that Cabel built. [Watch]
On the last two, note have we’ve never managed to add the Equal Rights Amendment to our Constitution. It just hangs out there in the wind, un-ratified, its absence alive as fodder for Supreme Court Justices to whittle down personal freedoms as they please. Justice Anton Scalia, for example: “Certainly, the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that is what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.” Chilling. ↩
/now is inspired by Derek Sivers’ concept of the same name, with a few additions. I intend to update it regularly, but infrequently.
My writing on this site comes from my own personal views and does not reflect or represent the views of my employer.
/previously… (February 6, 2019)
It’s a cold day in Los Angeles—I know, but really for LA temps in the 40s are cold. LA feels like a foreign land when weather moves in. Cold or rain or grey, it becomes a different place. It’s as if the ethos of Los Angeles is inexorably tied to the warmth and the sun. Without those elements the city ceases to be LA and something else entirely takes its place.
Bundled up and walking around the city, I temporarily cannot recognize it. My head is swirling with the chaotic thoughts of “now”. My professional “now” is more a list of “coming soon”. I am deep into the build phase of a client project I am really excited about, but with a backlog of spinning plates: pitching new work, designing a site for a passion project with my sister (opening up this spring), rebranding my own work practice, and scheming about yet another “new thing” idea that I can’t expunge from my brain.
In the organized chaos, one theme is emerging: I feel uniquely open to the new: ready for fresh challenges, new ways of working, new collaborations, new new.
🤓 Technical Tangent
To my surprise, I have recently found myself working in Wordpress. I hadn’t touched the platform in at least 10 years, but it made the most sense to keep a client on it and now here we are. So, I made a deep dive into the current state-of-affairs around hosting and theme building. Wordpress is still Wordpress, but the research has been a surprisingly-fruitful undertaking. I’ve strapped some modern tooling onto theme building. The result is a workflow with Sass, ES6, proper asset management, linting, continuous integration, and modern deployment techniques. Props to Jonathan Brennan’s blanket for sending me down this path. I forked it and have been fiddling a bunch. Other notables: Trellis from Roots, and the S3-Uploads/Tachyon combo from Human Made.
🤟🏼 Three Things
House of Rain – Recommended to me by my sister, this book gave me a fresh perspective on the Four Corners region of the American Southwest and the ancient indigenous peoples we call “Anasazi”. [Read]
LA Tourist Race - Mike did a killer job putting together a fun event and, despite my DNF, I’m excited for the next one. [Participate]
The site is static and structured for speed. It is built as simply as possible using Sass, javascript (no frameworks), and compiled with heavily-modified Jekyll. Building and deploying the site is handled automagically with CircleCI. The CI server uploads the site to S3 and it is then served to you through the CloudFrontCDN. Your device talks to a server that is as physically close as possible to you in the world—every little bit matters. There is a staging environment and if you’re lucky you might catch some work in-progress.
This fairly-opinionated setup is available for you to use as a GitHub template I call Yassss or “Yet another simple static site starter”.
If you’ve read this far, you probably need some kittens as a reward.
Oh, and be sure to find the easter eggs… 👀
A note on privacy: This website collects no analytics, serves no javascript from 3rd-party servers, and once initially loaded, server communication is limited to requesting additional site content in JSON format (additional javascript is never loaded).
A note on AI: To-date, this website has been designed, written, and built* without the assistance of artificial intelligence. I make this statement not as a value judgement, but as a way to mark a moment in history—early 2023. I don’t know where my sort of work goes from here, but I have a feeling I will not be able to make such a statement much longer.
*Update November 26, 2023: GitHub Copilot helped me rewrite a broken regex, so… yup. In fairness to me, humans were never meant to understand regex.
My writing on this site comes from my own personal views and does not reflect or represent the views of my employer.