A Human-centered Mettaverse
web3 is our chance to cleanly break from everything that went wrong with consumer technology. Or it's a chance to repeat every mistake faster.
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To My Most Talented Friends
I've heard you're bored with making products at corporations to enrich billionaires. Me too. An open letter to my talented friends about what comes next.
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Decentralized Identity
You've seen .eth domains around. They're much bigger than wallet nicknames — they're the beginning of actually owning your identity online.
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Finding The Grain
Meaningful projects take sustained effort — but they shouldn't feel like writing a dissertation with a pen that's out of ink. Work with the grain, not against it.
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Bottom-up Writing
Roam and Notion couldn't be more different — and that difference maps perfectly to how brains actually work.
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Humans Not Resources
When algorithms can do what you do, being skilled isn't enough. The differentiator is telling compelling stories — of yourself, your work, and what you want to contribute.
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Showcasing the Showcasers
Shaggy's chart-topping hit wasn't supposed to go further than the middle of a forgotten album. One passionate DJ changed that — and there's a lesson in it for all of us.
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In Public; In Service
On most days I write thousands of words, yet publish precious few of them. The Inner Critic has strong opinions about that ratio.
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Crafting Cohesive & Collaborative Spatial Social Software for Patrons' Permanent Pondering
Conferences are weird: paying a bunch of money to sit in a banquet room drinking stale urn coffee. But the hallway conversations — those are where the real design happens.
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Why I am optimistic again
When I became disenchanted with technology in 2018, it shattered a mythology I'd spent my 20s immersed in. It took a while to find a reason to be excited again.
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Breadcrumbs & Rabbit Holes with Roam
Roam is the only tool I've found that fits my ADHD brain like a glove — capturing as fast as I can think, leaving breadcrumbs for a future self to follow.
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The Evolution of Tools: Towards Design Intelligence
Design tools have traditionally represented design as pixels and rectangles — things that look like the outcome but aren't it. We're finally ready for something smarter.
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Dragging Rectangles
Since the Mac, design tooling has revolved around dragging rectangles. And yet I see nothing to tie the role of designer to rectangle-dragger.
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Painting With Code
We built react-sketchapp — an open-source library that lets you write React components that render to Sketch documents. Here's what we've been doing with it.
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Declarative Design Tools
Design is a process of divergence and convergence. Our tools should speak the language of that process — not force us to translate our ideas into rectangles first.
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