I started as a software engineer. Somewhere along the way I crossed into design, but the line between designing something and building it has never made much sense to me.
The most interesting problems live in between, where the system you’re shaping starts to shape how people think and behave, often in ways nobody planned. I keep finding myself drawn there: not to the interface, but to the mechanisms underneath it.
I believe the right relationship with tools is collaborative, not delegatory. Cognitive work you hand off entirely is cognitive capacity you permanently lose. My are experiments in solving that for myself: tools for capturing thought, structuring it, making it useful to my future self.
My instinct in most situations is subtraction. I find elegance in constraint more reliably than I find it in options. This shows up in how I design, in how I write, even in how I run a meeting.
I’m better at building small things well than building large things quickly. I’ve spent a long time learning that about myself, and a long time finding environments that believe it too.