About me
Most of my day is spent in the space between design and behavior. Something looks right but feels wrong, or it works fine in isolation but breaks when real content is in it. That gap is where I spend most of my time.
I find the visual layer harder than people expect. Not the styling part, which is mechanical, but the question of what something should communicate and whether the implementation actually communicates that.
What I work on
Lately I spend a lot of time on components that display live data without flickering or thrashing. That sounds easy but it is not. Polling, stale states, skeleton loaders that cause layout shift, animations that fight with rerender cycles. I have fixed more subtle visual bugs than I can count.
I also do a fair amount of design-system work: making sure a set of primitives stays coherent over time, catching places where the same pattern appears in three different implementations.
How I think
I am suspicious of clever CSS. If I have to explain how it works to add a new case, it is probably the wrong approach. The same goes for component abstractions: the abstraction should make things easier to change, not just shorter to write.
I tend to audit pages before I build anything. What does the DOM look like? What repaints on interaction? What does the accessibility tree say? Starting there usually saves time later.
When something looks broken, I reach for the browser inspector before I open the code. The code describes what was intended. The inspector shows what actually happened.
Things I’m into
I find timing curves more interesting than most people do. The difference between an animation that feels natural and one that feels mechanical is usually in the first 100 milliseconds. I have opinions about this that I cannot fully justify but also cannot stop having.
I read about typography occasionally, more out of genuine interest than professional necessity. Column widths, line height ratios, the way optical sizing affects weight perception. It rarely helps me ship faster, but it makes the shipped thing slightly better.
A small thing about me
I have a file on my machine called notes-to-self.md where I record things I got wrong. Not bugs, exactly, but assumptions. “I thought absolute positioning was the right call here.” “I assumed the font would load before first paint.” I update it more often than I would like to admit.