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Self-improvement

Choices

August 8, 2023
August 8, 2023

I woke up at 5:00 AM today, not as part of a "seize the day" productivity practice, but because I struggled to fall and stay asleep. Like many of us, I grabbed my phone and spent 30 minutes scrolling through it, a decision I knew I would regret.

Coding

How I learned to code

This is the story of how I learned how to code. In short, how I learned was by (no lie) reading through the entire source code of jQuery. I did this about 10 years ago.

July 27, 2023
July 27, 2023
Productivity

On the line - Productivity ideas from restaurant kitchens

Before working in the tech sector, I spent several years working in restaurants. There were many things I learned from my time on the line.

October 24, 2022
July 21, 2023
Tools

Analog Tools

Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is to detach from the digital and return to the simplicity that is analog. There's profoundness in the level of productivity you can experience with some things so primitive.

July 26, 2022
July 21, 2023
Design Systems

Creating a Variable System

Working with globalized variables maybe one of the trickier aspects to any design or code project. It’s sort of like accumulating a collection of a particular collectable, say Pokemon cards. It’s cool that you can collect these cards! I mean, who wouldn’t want an original 1st edition base set Charizard.

October 23, 2020
July 21, 2023
Design Systems

Creating a Context System

One of the more “abstract” but important and powerful systems within G2 Components is it’s “Context” system. Given the name, those familiar with libraries like React may immediately think of React.Context. It’s kinda close, but it’s much much more than that.

September 21, 2020
July 21, 2023
Design Systems

Creating a Style System

One of the biggest and most important challenges for the G2 Components project was defining and creating the Style system. The Style system is one of the core system that’s responsible for managing and powering the entire UI layer for the library.

August 31, 2020
July 21, 2023
Component design

Animation Interpolations

In other words… smoothly transitioning from one thing to another thing! In traditional animation (think the good ol’ hand drawn stuff), this process of transitioning between two key poses (or key frames) is known as inbetweening.

August 19, 2020
July 21, 2023
Component Design

Designing Draggables, Droppables, and Sortables

Drag gestures are becoming increasingly more popular in Web UIs – and for good reason! They’re super easy to use!

August 17, 2020
July 22, 2023
Component Design

Creating Smart Layout Components (HStack, VStack, and ZStack)

In today’s Zoom session, I streamed the design and creation process for creating a handful of SwiftUI inspired layout components for G2: HStack, VStack, and ZStack.

August 12, 2020
July 22, 2023
Design systems

Core Systems for Components

For years now, I’ve been thinking very deeply about design systems, with a focus on UI / component libraries.

August 11, 2020
July 22, 2023
Experiments

Creating a Self Resizing Card

Every so often, I get randomly inspired to code something... experimental. Recently, I felt particularly ambitious, and thought it would be neat to create a self-resizing Card component with fancy animations.

January 30, 2019
July 22, 2023
CSS

Naming CSS Class Names

You're working on some UI. It's a series of CSS problems. You figured out the styles required to solve it. All you gotta do is create a couple of new CSS class names.

January 14, 2019
July 22, 2023
Design Engineering

Design Engineer - The Role

Every so often, a tweet or blog post would make me reflect upon my career in the web development industry. Being a hybrid design/coder, I can't help but feel out of place within in.

January 10, 2019
July 22, 2023
Engineering

Writing Release Notes

If you work on a library or module (be it open sourced or closed), writing really good (at least adequate) release notes is one of the most important things you can do.

January 9, 2019
July 22, 2023
Design

New Face

Happy New Year lovely Internet people! I hope all of you had a wonderful 2018, and have some fun-filled goals for 2019.

January 5, 2019
July 22, 2023
Design Engineering

Make Design Engineering Happen

This year, I started mentoring at Out of Office Hours. I've had multiple sessions, and one very interesting thing I've noticed is that every single person I've spoken to has said…

April 7, 2018
July 22, 2023
Writing

Let's try this again!

Oh boy! It's only been… about 4 months since I wrote something. Not a day goes by where I don't think…

April 1, 2018
July 22, 2023
Design Engineering

What it means to be a Design Engineer

Recently, I had a catch-up chat with a product designer colleague from work (his name is Buzz and he is awesome). One of the things we talked about was the various things I did at Help Scout.

December 8, 2017
July 22, 2023
Writing

Why is writing so hard.

Goodness. Gracious. Why is writing so hard! Since re-launching my site, I've set a personal goal to write at least once a week. I gave myself a soft-pass this week, as I sorta missed my goal by a bit. But I was busy!

December 3, 2017
July 27, 2023