I fell in love with the web in the early days when pages were 960 pixels wide and links were blue and purple. The prospect of a single person putting something on the internet that could be seen anywhere in the world fascinated me. I've been making sites, then experiences, and now apps on the web for over twenty five years, and that same excitement drives me to this day.

In the early days, I taught myself the tech: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for fancy rollovers. I made websites for friends and small businesses. Web standards weren't yet something we could count on, and I even made some websites using pixel spacer gifs.

Then I got serious about design. I learned how to synthesize complex information with text and images and to consider the experience of the user. I discovered infographics and data visualization and spent the next decade making bespoke interactive visualizations that told stories with data. I learned that data viz is 80% data manipulation and 20% writing UI code. I went deep on statistics and data transformation, and learned how to think carefully about what data is saying and how to visualize it so people draw correct conclusions from charts, graphs, and maps.

For the past several years I've been integrating data viz into design systems and building product UI in a beautiful, scalable way. I've always wanted to control every pixel, but the experience of leading a team of engineers taught me that I can't expect everyone to micromanage the UI as much as me, that I should build pixel perfection directly into the toolkit. Then engineers can focus on the logic and data and get the beautiful UI for free.

I've written using most of the popular web languages and frameworks at some point in my career. My main stack for the past several years has been React, D3, and styled-components, with a bent toward keeping other dependencies to a minimum and resorting to vanilla JavaScript for everything else. I love how un-opinionated React is about how I modularize my code. When I look at the files and folders in a codebase, I want to see the product features, not the framework. React’s simple component structure makes that easy. When I need to write APIs myself, I use Node.

Lately I've been thinking about the design and UX of codebases, how to write user-friendly intuitive code, and modularizing codebases so they retain simplicity as they scale.