Notes

Writing on systems, craft, and building.

Musings, occasional notes on design systems, design engineering, and working at the intersection of design and AI.

22 August 2026 · 9 min read

From component variants to a bookable practitioner map

It started as a single shimmering loading card. It ended up deployed: 4,000 practitioners in Postgres, geospatial search, timezone-aware booking. This is the piece-by-piece story of how each component went from Figma variant to working software.

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21 August 2026 · 11 min read

Let AI read the record before the clinician has to

An experiment in using AI to reconstruct the whole patient story — physical health, wellbeing and context — so clinicians can spend more attention on the human part.

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21 August 2026 · 6 min read

Don't spend the appointment reconstructing the week

A thin fake clinic chart. The home program on the phone is the same object on the treatment-room iPad. Recap is optional.

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20 August 2026 · 12 min read

What if booking software understood how people actually negotiate time?

A design-engineering experiment exploring how motion, progressive disclosure and smarter availability could make booking feel less like filling in a database.

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20 August 2026 · 5 min read

Those dates don't quite work

A blocked night shouldn't dump you back to an empty calendar. This is a prototype of keeping the trip, not a claim it converts.

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20 August 2026 · 7 min read

The checkout you already know, moving

I stopped trying to invent a new object for paying. Stripe already won the shape. The remainder is Motion: a card that fills as you type, a flip for CVC, a button that becomes a check.

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19 August 2026 · 6 min read

The gap gets smaller when you build both sides

Faster engineering doesn't make craft optional. It makes the quality of your decisions impossible to hide.

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18 August 2026 · 11 min read

I designed and built a SaaS product in a day. It's... actually not bad.

Not a landing page. Not three beautiful screens. A working product with 3,000 dogs, a real database, and 24 hours on the clock.

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16 August 2026 · 12 min read

How I built a React accordion gallery

Entry 1 in a React tutorial series: integrate AccordionGallery with GSAP, wire props and motion, keep keyboard and reduced-motion honest, then add an expand control.

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8 August 2026 · 22 min read

From Figma Design System to React Library: A Quick Tutorial in the PR Loop

Connect Claude Code to your Figma design system, turn Tailwind buttons and toggles into real React, and house them in a Vercel-hosted library with a proper PR workflow.

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8 August 2026 · 14 min read

From Figma to Live URL: A Designer's First Afternoon of Real Code

A copy-paste tutorial for designers with zero terminal experience: turn a Figma idea into a working React prototype and deploy it to a real URL.

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8 August 2026 · 10 min read

I Design for Carers. I Couldn't Let Anyone Care for Me.

I work for a company that helps carers care. Then a seizure made me the one who needed care, and I lied about it to everyone to avoid the panic.

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8 August 2026 · 8 min read

The Translation Tax: Why Design Engineering Carries Its Weight in Gold

Every handoff pays a hidden translation tax. Design engineering exists so professional design and UX survive contact with production, and that is why the role carries its weight in gold.

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3 August 2026 · 8 min read

Thirty-Eight Years of Low Tide

A goodbye letter to Thorpe Bay: thirty-eight years of mudflats, runner-up trophies, seafront donuts, and the heartbreak of leaving the place that built me.

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3 August 2026 · 8 min read

Put the Object in the Room

Six meetings on the same feature, forty-two frames, and a room that would not decide. What changed when I stopped showing pictures and built a working prototype.

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31 July 2026 · 7 min read

The Quietest Person in the Room Is Often Doing the Most Work

Meetings pay out on airtime, not thinking. A case for the people who chew on ideas, from someone who has been both the talker and the silent one.

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19 July 2026 · 6 min read

Clocking Off

On a question my daughter asked me, a promise I made in a hospital bed, and why logging off at the same time every day made me better at the work I love.

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4 July 2026 · 4 min read

The tree is the URL: a tree testing tool with no backend

Tree testing validates navigation before you design a pixel. Commercial tools gate it behind subscriptions, but it's text, tasks, and paths. So I built a free one the same way as the card sort.

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4 July 2026 · 4 min read

AI didn't lower the craft bar. It exposed who never had it.

Show two designers the same AI-generated screen and you'll get two different reads. One sees a finished artifact. The other sees four decisions nobody made. That gap has always existed. AI just made it visible faster.

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3 July 2026 · 4 min read

The study is the URL: a card sorting tool with no backend

Research tools put card sorting behind a subscription. It's a solved interaction pattern and a small data model, so I built a free one into this site. Here's what got cut and why.

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