Notes & Writing
Journal
Notes on the work while it's happening — what broke, what I changed my mind about, what I had to look up.
I Checked a Hundred Things Everyone Thinks They Remember
I made a list of a hundred little app animations and wrote down where each one really came from. The lesson wasn't about animation. It was how much of what we all confidently 'know' about famous app moments turns out to be wrong.
ReadThe Index
- Making thingsJul 17, 2026
I Did It the Hard Way on Purpose
I rebuilt ten apps the slowest, most tedious way possible — every button placed by hand, nothing reused. That sounds like a waste of time. It's the whole reason they look real instead of like a mockup.
- Calm designJul 17, 2026
The Best Screen Is One You Barely Notice
There's a whole line of thinking that says a good tool should get out of your way and disappear. It sounds soft until you notice the sharp little rule hiding inside it — and how backwards most of our apps are compared to it.
- Computer historyJul 17, 2026
I Rebuilt Old Computers and Learned My Memory Was Lying
I rebuilt ten old computer screens from scratch — the Commodore 64, Windows 95, the first iPhone. The rule that made it work: don't trust your memory of them. Your memory of an old screen is wrong in ways you won't notice until someone who was there does.
- ProcessJul 16, 2026
I Only Trusted My Method Once It Survived the Opposite
I had a way of making animations that I was proud of. But I couldn't tell if it was actually good, or just a lucky fit for one kind of work — so I pointed it at the exact opposite kind and watched what happened.
- ProcessJul 15, 2026
I Built This Three Times Before It Worked
The finished version of a project is the third one I made. The first two weren't practice — they were finished, wrong, and thrown away. Here's what was broken each time, because 'we kept improving it' is what everyone says and nobody shows.
- Data visualizationJul 13, 2026
Death by a Thousand Cells
Everyone squints at the same spreadsheet for thirty seconds before they find the number that matters. The math is fine — nothing on screen tells you where to look. So I rebuilt it as a dashboard.