I’m a frontend developer trapped inside a product designer’s body.
Currently I’m...
- Designing products for marketing teams at Litmus
- Leading our internal frontend working group and design system
- Building Tootbox, a career journal app for professional growth
Work
Trial & onboarding
Designed a user onboarding experience that increased our self-serve activation rate more than 150% in one quarter
Design system
Leading internal platform, visual design, frontend development, and documentation for our product-wide component library
Trello power-up
Designed a project management integration to improve email marketing workflows, chosen by Trello as a featured Power-Up
WYSIWYG editor
Redesigned and rebuilt a legacy WYSIWYG editor for creating HTML emails
Redesign & design system
Overhauled the front end of an enterprise SaaS product to be more modern and maintainable
Search
Designed, built, and shipped a much-needed feature inside of a two-week sprint with one software engineer
Better Placeholder
Designed and coded “Placeholdit’s missing UI,” an interface to quickly generate URL parameters for custom images
How to Target Email Clients
Designed and coded a filterable, crowdsourced database of email development techniques
Writing
- Linked: The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers (Chris Coyier)
- How I’m spending my autumn vacation Details of updates to my Jekyll site relating to post categories, RSS, and content management
- Things I like A living, growing list of little things I like
- Linked: Natalya Shelburne on Design Engineering (Shop Talk Show)
- Linked: UI developers are still underestimated (Dev.to)
- Redrawing resized illustrations for pixel perfection Sometimes it‘s the little things.
- Linked: ‘Real’ Programming is an Elitist Myth (Wired)
- Linked: Career narratives (Will Larson)
- Living Litmus values Quotes from my coworkers about how I ‘collaborate with bias to action’ and ‘take it to heart.’
- All software is lists Displaying data to users isn‘t very hard, which makes designing, marketing, and messaging a successful product more difficult. What’s the angle? How is it different than the next thing?
- Breaking good habits What I’ve learned is that, for me to be productive in writing, I need to both have something on my mind and I need the discipline to tell myself, “okay, now I’m going to write.”
- The product design create-a-player What is a product designer anyway? What skills do they have? And what makes someone a senior?
- I gave up Scrum and all I got was this immediate sense of relief You don’t realise how bad incomplete sprints are for team morale until you don’t have to deal with them anymore.
- HTML Crimes Building a markup linter into the frontend of our local environment to improve semantics and accessibility
- The Developer’s Curse On my struggle to ignore distractions and create new habits that stick
- Boxed in Until square companies embrace the blob, otherwise valuable employees will continue to be unsupported, underutilised, and unfulfilled.
- Visualising blog article frequency Website redesign: Shaming myself into productivity with a JavaScript chart
- What’s with the sheep? Website redesign: Punk’s not dead, it’s just stuck in the footer
- Fresh coat of paint Website redesign: Typography, colours, post counts, and some plans
- New content hierarchy Website redesign: Deciding what’s most important and how to present it. Plus, small feature ideas and a hint about some weird fun.
- Redesigning my website in the open There’s been a bit of a wave lately of designers redesigning their websites in the open. I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring.
- These People Again Of all the conference and meetup talks I’ve ever seen, only two standout as truly terrible.
- Democratisation of knowledge in a capitalist industry Should equal access to information include equal access to guides based on it? To tools or technology built on top of it? To the information in its most convenient form?
- Minimising my environmental impact Some practical, achieveable changes I pledge to make.
- Case study: Redesigning and refactoring an enterprise web app How I turned around design and front end as the first product hire of an early stage startup.
- Weeknotes 2019-W19 On ice hockey, admitting you’re related to The Edge from U2, and saying yes.
- In defence of the company group chat
- Table stakes I asked designers at London tech companies: Does your company offer flexible working hours?
- Telling a company they suck won’t get you hired The ideal client values your discipline, knows what it costs, and is ready to buy.
- How to audit your LinkedIn connections
- To free or not to free I’ve been thinking about the apps I use and which ones I pay for. How do I decide who to support?
- Droning on
- Weeknotes 2019-W12 On Sensitive Subjects, conference proposals, and the guilt of taking sick days.
- Sensitive Subjects A few things I learned about programming while building a small web project.
- Weeknotes 2019-W11 “You shouldn’t just enquire. You should write, too.”
- The Revolutin’ will not be ostracised Everyone wants to talk about ethics in tech but not as much as they want free stickers.
- The ‘delete account’ button is the message
- How to host better meetings My seven golden rules to stop wasting everyone’s time.
- A look back at my 2018 resolutions How I did and how I feel about it.
- What should your hourly rate be as a freelancer? Take a simple formula, tweak it to work for you, and consider an alternative to selling time.
- How to write Rails comments that don’t appear in rendered HTML
- Southpaw grammar
- Don’t draw shitty Spider-Men Deadlines are the enemy of quality, but sometimes they’re unavoidable. So what do we do?
- Notes from product owner training A transcription of all of my notes from a two-day Certified Scrum Product Owner course.
- A Million Email Geeks on a Million Keyboards Video of my talk about the value of online communities for people working in niche industries and roles.
- All talk
- A certain perfect ratio
- First impressions of Google Contributor
- Right-click, copy link address
- Grid enough
- RSS boys we out here There’s a perfectly good Twitter alternative right here.
- Solving for (f) Every once in a while a designer writes an article that totally changes the way I think about something.
- Maintaining your sanity while using Slack A mostly complete guide to actually getting some work done
- Broken leg Three things you should do when preparing to speak at a tech event
- Banner year Recounting the highlights of a successful 2017
- A better placeholder image generator I built the user interface Placehold.it should have had all along.
- Reasons to pay it forward It was obvious from 10:00 on Monday that Reasons To wasn’t going to be like the conferences I normally attend.
- Show your hand It’s rare to see a designer cop to their influences, especially when those influences are their contemporaries.
- How to avoid getting ripped off by a client Eight steps you need to take on every single project to protect yourself as a freelancer
- Briefly on Briefly Thoughts on setting the stage for a successful project