super fucking cool dude. sr staff design eng @tryramp. I do automation and design systems for brand and creative. I play punk music and draw silly pictures too.
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Joined November 2019
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Drew Minns retweeted
The "design engineer" archetype in intelligence era needs be someone much further-reaching on both ends.
Beyond DESIGN,
a keener social intuition, a rich visual + tonal vernacular, broadly read, a deep understanding of people. They need to be deeply-feeling themselves, and not Maslow's 'existential zombies.' They need an investigative & suspended disbelief, but also a discernment and sanity to prevent psychosis. Far beyond just buttons + sliders. Much closer to a novelist or anthropologist.
Beyond ENGINEER,
a deep-seated intuition of machine intelligence: how they traverse latent space, what they can / cannot do well. A scientific approach to prodding this 'grown-not-built' intelligence. Far beyond just CRUD apps. Practically: ability to fine-tune + benchmark models, among other skills, to bridge machine intelligence to the more design/humanistic.
FWIW: all this is very good for a field — software design — that has recently (and rightfully) become the butt of jokes, and seen as a very unserious discipline
Ok ya. Cool. But then you have a massive file that, sure, you can edit it. But, then you’re shipping a working file to a user that’s slow to load when all they need is a png.
Cool doesn’t mean useful.
I feel like we're looking at something so much BIGGER than just better and more detailed SVGs.
SVGs are essentially images made entirely from code. Instead of storing millions of pixels like a PNG or JPEG, it uses math instructions to describe shapes, paths, colors, gradients, etc....
and Quiver is now generating these incredibly detailed illustrations that look almost like polished 3D renders, except they're actually editable vector graphics.
But what happens when these models eventually get so good that they can generate SVGs that are indistinguishable from photorealistic images? At that point, why would we need image models at all?
and if you can create any image entirely through code, you could theoretically generate every frame in a video in the same way and suddenly, instead of generating a fixed sequence as an mp4, you would be able to generate fully editable programmatic scenes.
I don't know what this means for the future, or if it will even work in this way, but holy molly, it's gonna be interesting
A haiku:
I went to the Louvre.
Everyone took selfies.
Do artists matter?
Put your phone away you fucking idiots.
Drew Minns retweeted
One of my recent favorite AI use cases: asking it to try and break the stuff I built. Adding lots of data, long names, unusual emails, labels, etc. Coming up with worst case scenario basically.
This is a vibe-coded demo, but you get the idea.
Drew Minns retweeted
How good is Jev at designing a design system?
You give it one sentence, and it picks from over 1 quadrillion combinations.
Nothing in the video is sped up, each restyle is 4 parallel calls: about 2 seconds, $0.0007
29 flags control corner shape, borders, icon family, chart paths, page texture, density and motion, all on @shadcn. Colour, radius, spacing and type scale are continuous on top of that.
Interesting little Sunday experiment
Couldn’t agree more. Coming from consulting work to a team, it took me a long time to chill the fuck out and contribute as a larger piece of the puzzle. You’re there for a reason. Not to save the day, but to be part of a team. Fucking chill dawg.
new post: the senior engineer death spiral
sunilpai.dev/posts/the-senio…
a friend just started a big job and asked for some advice. so I braindumped a monologue about a super common failure mode I see with engineers and posted it here, hope it helps whoever it can.
What happens when Canada and EU allow visa-free work barriers to come down. Will all the smart, educated Canadian talent leaves US roles for better ones aligned with their cultures and values?
Drew Minns retweeted
New experiment: json-render + jev
The future Generative UI is instant
Your components, your actions, your design system
Rendered in milliseconds
My dude @PaulJun_ is a clever and thoughtful human. I've been fortunate to work with him at @tryramp and encourage everyone else to strive to do the same at some point in their life. Because, wow, this stuff he's writing about, we're doing. Rethinking design systems and tooling for something different than product: brand and creative. it moves fast, it's expressive. But it still needs to feel polished and coherent.
4700 word labor of love. I've seen all the patterns and heard every story about in-house brand/creative studio teams.
This is my vision for where brand teams can go (and why I joined @tryramp).
Brand systems that behave like jazz. Brand as software.
Last night I saw the Odyssey. I booked a solo seat online 20 mins before the movie starts. The minute the trailers end, a crew of dudes moves in to my right side. During a loud scene, I decide to relocate. While moving all my gear (popcorn, napkin pile, water, phone), I drop my wallet down under the seats in front of me. So I gotta wait three hours to get it back and they’re the “watch to the credits are rolled” types because I’m totally the coolest guy ever.
Anyways. That’s my social anxiety.
These landslides and flood in Tibet and Nepal are fucking wild. This is a total climate induced disaster. A chunk of a glacier fell off in the mountains and FELL.
Drew Minns retweeted
i’m going to tell my kids this is what debugging was like before LLMs
i made a game where you literally have to find a missing semicolon in a codebase of 187,421 lines
the catch is the entire codebase is printed out and taped to the walls of an office and you have to inspect it line by line
Play it here:
semicolon.trm.sh/
I used to hang out on twitter when it was cool. Then I deleted it. Now, I’m back because we’ve made the internet too big and it’s hard to find cool things that inspire me. Don’t let me down tech and design folks!
Drew Minns retweeted
A newly resolved proposal would allow us to select classes that are a prefix for variations with a wildcard, like .prefix-*.
css-tricks.com/resolved-css-…
Spend the weekend hitting things and making your brain tell your limbs to do different things. Creativity doesn’t have to have a screen.
