This is my now page, a brief summary of what I’m currently focused on.
Update: 2025-02-21
A very wet and cold winter seems to be slowly giving way to spring, and it’s warming up here in Northern California. The cherry plum tree in my backyard has started to bloom, and my kids and I just returned from a neighborhood bike ride and trip to the local gelato shop. If it weren’t for having to bear witness to the ongoing and rampant destruction of democracy in the United States, life would be pretty good right now.
Here’s what I’m currently up to…
Leading “design engineers”…
…or UX engineers or design technologists or whatever you’d like to call them. I’m currently in the fortunate position to be leading a 40+ person organization of incredibly talented hybrid designer-developers at Adobe who do everything from build our design system to partner with product teams on high-fidelity prototyping of new products and features.
Beyond growing the team, I’m currently focused on exploring the future of UX engineering and prototyping in a world where AI-based tools are rapidly empowering designer-developer generalists like those on my team to do even more. Much of this is separating AI hype from reality; determining what really works and actually makes a difference in real-world use cases beyond the most rudimentary.
Writing and working on this site
Most of my spare time for side projects has been focused on getting a new version of this site/blog/“digital garden” both redesigned, migrated from Jekyll to Eleventy, and ported over to a new domain. If you’re reading this, it means I finally got it to the point where I’m comfortable sharing it publicly. I anticipate I’ll be continuing to tweak the design and adding new features or refactoring in the months to come.
Parenting and outdoors-focused travel
My kids are now 6 and almost 8, which has made travel and family outings much easier than ever before. We just returned from a short, local trip to Monterey and Carmel to explore the tide pools and California coast. And we have a few camping trips planned for later in the spring and early summer that I’m very much looking forward to.
Learning Julia
One of my goals this year is to get back into creative coding for pen plotters using a new programming language. Historically, I have always used Python and the Vsketch environment. However, I was always frustrated by Python’s poor performance, and really wanted a language with a better REPL experience for rapid experimentation. After a lot of evaluation of various Lisp flavors, I’ve landed on Julia instead for future projects. It’s still early days, but I’m having a lot of fun learning.
Baking bread
On weekends I’m still baking sourdough bread and bagels. I recently acquired a Challenger Bread Pan and it has been a game-changer, especially for batard-shaped loaves. It’s expensive, but I love it.