Are you a designer or a developer?

I’m a product-thinking maker at heart, with a T-shaped profile. Design goes far beyond making something beautiful. As Dustin Senos once said “Painting a broken car, no matter how great the paint job is, doesn’t make the car useful.” Awareness for the engineering side of products is immensely valuable as it allows you to produce work that is technically feasible and thought-through from multiple perspectives.

I specialize in front-end development and product design, and my multidisciplinary experience helps me do what I love—building the right products and making them work better. Sometimes this means a deep dive into the front-end architecture to build a new foundation for design and engineering (e.g. a design system). Other times it means working through design problems from beginning to end. If available, I enjoy working with dedicated research and visual design teams, as it allows me to focus on my strengths.

What is your design process?

I adjust my design process according to the project scope. Sometimes this means working through design problems from beginning to end:

• Identifying the project scope: What are we trying to achieve? What are the design and business goals? Who are we designing it for (personas)? Why do they/we need it? What are the constraints? What is the priority?
• Research: Gather insights. Understand how people use the product (what works, what doesn’t)? What are competitors doing?
• Create concepts: Explore versions, ideas, and flows for all supported screen sizes. Identify the individual pieces that work, gather quick peer feedback, and iterate. Integrate edge cases, dirty data, and states.
• Prototype design: Increase fidelity to gain feedback from stakeholders. Validate concept with real data to cover edge cases, dirty data, and states. Iterate based on the feedback and new discoveries.
• Polish design: Design the fine-grained details of components, interactions, and transitions.
• Document design and handoff deliverables: Ideally using the company’s design system or expand it with new components.
• Collect and analyse feedback: Gather real user feedback to measure the success of the solution. If the problem isn’t solved, iterate further.

Other times this means I want to generate fast, tangible results. For example, I often make trivial front-end changes directly in code to get real user feedback as quickly as possible.

What are your tools of choice?

I usually sketch with Pigma Micron’s in a Maruman Mnemosyne notebook. For high-fidelity designs I use Figma. I manage projects with Asana and YouTrack. My current editor is VS Code, but Sublime Text was my first love. Here are my dotfiles for macOS, if you’re interested in my exact setup.

For front-end development I prefer TypeScript, React, Apollo Client, GraphQl, styled-components, Stylelint, and ESLint. When I’m not using styled-components, I follow the BEM methodology to write CSS that is easy to maintain and scale.

I’m also big into automation, for which I prefer Python.

What’s your take on front-end frameworks?

Frameworks come with baked-in knowledge. They can accelerate the development process, as you don’t have to reinvent everything from scratch. The best frameworks use best practices, and you don’t have to maintain their core. This makes them great for prototypes and early-stage products that haven’t reached product/market fit yet.

Later on for CSS a custom solution becomes easier to maintain and extend than a framework. For my own projects I prefer a custom solution based on the code-guide I follow. That said, I have experience with the usual subjects (Semantic UI, Bootstrap, Foundation, Material Design Lite, Primer, etc.).

For JavaScript it’s a bit different. Since ES6, development got a lot better, and while I favor plain TypeScript for small projects, at a certain scale a library like React in combination with Apollo Client, React Query or Recoil makes development and state management more robust.

What are some backend examples you’ve coded?

Content management system, analytics site, and a social network, to name a few.

Where do you live?

I’m currently based in Munich, Germany. I was born and raised in Germany. My working language is English, and German is my mother tongue.

Do you have experience working remotely?

Yes. I’ve co-founded My Morning Routine LLC in San Francisco, California. I mostly worked remotely from Germany, while my team was based in the Bay Area. I’m used to manage and collaborate with an international team.

What do you enjoy doing away from the screen?

I love hiking and exploring cities. I recently did some long hikes in California and Arizona, and I’ve walked most of NYC (not just Manhattan), San Francisco, New Orleans, Austin, Tucson, Marrakech, Lisbon, Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, and Montreal. I also enjoy reading books, taking photos, riding my bike, and playing basketball.

What are some of your favorite books?

Sprint, The Making of a Manager, and everything we’ve collected in the My Morning Routine Library.

Spaces or tabs?

Spaces (more precisely, soft-tabs with two spaces)! Spaces are the only way to guarantee code renders the same in any person’s environment.

Where can I follow you online?

I’m most active on Twitter (now maybe more on Mastodon), and you can also subscribe to my RSS feed. Lastly, feel free to connect with me on GitHub and LinkedIn.