Blog
Design thinking, project narratives, and interface ideas.
Marking AI content with a magenta→cyan gradient
A small visual primitive that makes AI-written prose impossible to miss — both for visitors and for me. Pink background, CGA palette, lives in eidotter.
DOSBTS: Fork to TestFlight in One Session
Forking an open-source diabetes app, renaming 149 files, fighting code signing, and shipping to TestFlight. The surprisingly satisfying start of a retro health tool.
Spacewar! From Web to Apple TV
Porting a web game to the biggest screen in the house. From empty repo to TestFlight in one session, then the humbling reality of playtesting.
Spacewar! From DOS to Web
Reverse-engineering a 1985 DOS binary to get the physics right in a web recreation. A story about obsession with authenticity.
Inline Text Expansions: Context Without Clutter
How the new inline expansion pattern keeps articles skimmable while still surfacing citations, context, and nerdy details on demand.
Why Your Brain Prefers Folders Over Search (and What AI Gets Wrong)
Search feels powerful, but your brain still craves spatial navigation. Neuroscience shows why folders keep winning—and what AI needs to learn.
Accessibility Is Structural, Not Cosmetic
A deliberately retro, amber-on-black system sounds like an accessibility problem. It isn't — accessibility lives under the visuals, not in them. So I audited my own components and wrote down the ones that failed.
When Research Decides What Gets Built
The cliché is that UX research polishes the screens after the decisions are made. The most useful study I ever ran did the opposite — it decided what to build. Here's the line from a 2018 thesis to a product's core navigation model.
Consistency Dies at Adoption, Not Creation
I audited my own design system expecting a museum of small inconsistencies. The real debt was two things I wasn't looking for: hardcoded colors breaking the token contract, and consumers drifting a version at a time.
From Physicist to UX: The Long Way Home
I didn't set out to become a UX researcher. Like most good career paths, mine happened through a series of wrong turns, chance encounters, and one spectacular consulting failure.
Timeline OS: Building on the Solid Web
Why I'm betting on Tim Berners-Lee's vision for data ownership—and the lessons learned trying to build with it.