Design Engineers are well-positioned to step into the gap between product design and engineering and help close it from both sides.

The one in which I participate in the “blogging” chain letter that has been making the rounds in the indie web community.

Back in the summer of 2019, I wrote a draft on the ways tech companies were shaping life in our cities with something we tend to take for granted: maps.

A short reflection on the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election. I fear it has become ok to nibble at the margins of our ideals, “because it doesn’t affect me”.

I stumbled into Design Engineering. I didn’t set out to become one, but in a way I suppose I have always been one… I just couldn’t help myself. Good software can be created in organizations siloed by discipline, but it’s in that messy overlap of design, engineering, and other disciplines truly collaborating where great software is made.

The web was not designed for casual dopamine hits. It doesn’t try to keep you. Any single click may take you to an entirely different world with new possibilities.

We create class systems in many of the ways in which we design our society, but, at least in America, we don’t like to acknowledge them for what they are: choices to privilege some over others.

On leaving Instagram—or, rather, Instagram leaving me. I’ve been spending time thinking about what it means to be “online”. We don’t really own anything we put online. There’s always an end-user license agreement between us and the person (or bot) on the other end of the screen.

A long-overdue update in my previous “/now” series. This update covers the launch of a standalone brand for my independent work—Interdiscipline—and the near-simultaneous loss of that independence. Awkward.

I never really had a specific “coming out” moment—it happened incrementally, over time—but thankfully it has been years since I’ve felt afraid to be open about my sexuality in real life or online. I am not old, but I’m old enough to remember the idea of marriage feeling impossible. And even though I live in California, I am aware that those of us in the queer community still do not have the protections we need in most states…

Originally published to my now-defunct Ello account, this piece recounts a personal experience with the hack of my Instagram account. I learned some things… think?