That Cowgirl Creamery triple-cream soft cheese, or whatever it's called. Bless that cheese.

Started from scratch! But it's also a bunch of components, colors, and styles I've been slowly iterating on over the years, so there was a bit of a personal foundation.

Glad you found them useful! Yeah, these have been on my mind for a long, long time. They are just very time consuming and I find it hard to get motivated. I've been thinking recently that it could be fun to write about OS updates (like a more in-depth dissection post for something big like macOS Big Sur). To be determined!

I don't use Notion personally. I've used it for various projects externally, and it seems great, but I've never made the leap to move all my own work over to the service.

This question has been on my mind for a long time: what does deliberate "practice" look like for product designers? I think this would be a worthwhile blog post.

Not really a philosophy. I just like the way it looks, and the simple language makes it easier to maintain/update over time. Especially when you factor in things like dark mode, having a smaller surface area for component types and styles just makes things easier. I'm trying to keep this thing easy and fast to update so that I stay motivated to keep working on it over time.

Whale shark. No reason, but I would love to see one in-person some day.

Check out Refactoring UI!

A mixture of side projects and on-the-job learning. Side projects: making WordPress themes and learning to tweak the HTML, CSS, and PHP to get what I needed. Then at Buffer I was introduced to JavaScript in a production environment, Backbone, and more PHP. Eventually I picked up React and it really helps things click into place. For newbies: CSS and HTML fundamentals are a great place to start.

I think too many designers (myself included) fall into the trap of designing for our peers, and not for the target person. The really important, hard problems aren't usually that glamorous, and won't make a big splash on Twitter.

This episode of Design Details might cover more of that backstory. But we started in late 2014 after I had been writing the Design Details Blog series for a while (now called App Dissection). People seemed to find those posts valuable, so Bryn had the right idea to interview the designers who were making great UI decisions, and try to understand how they make their decisions.

I either take a break, or try to find some small (and fun) project to build a bit of momentum. Even if it feels like procrastinating, I find that the small wins quickly snowball and I can find myself in a groove after a few minutes that ends up fueling my "actual work." But the more honest answer is that I take a break and rest.

I don't think there's a point, really. It's probably as simple as: the day I wrote "hello world" in some REPL input. I still feel pretty weak on the code side, but it has been helpful to have some baseline.

We built too wide, too fast. We wanted to build every feature people asked for, and we ended up with a lot of half-baked UI and a buggy core product. We should have said "no" more, and put as much energy as possible into building a really smooth and fast core chat experience.

Yes, I pay for a Ghost subscription. WordPress would be a free alternative, or you could poke at any other static content CMS!

I'm so comfortable with styled-components that it's going to take some huge improvement in another library to get me to switch. But I admit I haven't been paying too much attention lately, so maybe there is some cool new tech that I should be playing with instead.