Our Latest Insights
Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our culture.
14 results shown.
Redefining Design: The Impact of AI on the Designer’s Role
December 6, 2024AI was a major focus at this year’s Config conference, signaling a significant shift for designers as Figma, a leading tool, continues to invest heavily in AI. This development raises critical questions for our field: How will AI shape our daily tasks? Will it unexpectedly impact roles from junior designers to senior leads? Many speakers at Config stressed, “AI is just a tool.” But is it? Or could it eventually reshape our roles and redefine what it means to design?Managing Remote Teams
December 3, 2024In the past five years, we’ve seen a significant shift in how companies approach work, with many moving towards remote-first environments. While some champion this model, others question whether it harms workplace engagement, raising concerns about maintaining strong connections and collaboration. Personally, I believe remote-first work can be just as enriching and fulfilling as any other structure no matter the distance—when it’s approached with intention and care.Automated Dependency Management: Why Leading Engineering Organizations Are Embracing It
November 22, 2024Highly efficient engineering organizations are automating software dependency management processes to save time and money, and most importantly reducing risks from vulnerabilities and supply chain attacks. External application dependencies play a critical role in today’s software ecosystem. By automating these processes, teams are free to focus on higher value tasks, while maintaining a secure and resilient codebase. ##Ranked Choice Voting: The Mobile Challenge
November 19, 2024While working on VoteHub, a mobile absentee ballot solution for U.S. elections, I was tasked with designing and prototyping an interface for a relatively new election contest type, rapidly gaining attention and adoption, called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).When and Why to Use Micro Frontend Architecture
November 12, 2024As businesses grow and their technical stacks evolve, micro frontends have emerged as a practical architectural strategy for managing complexity and improving scalability. Deciding when and why to adopt micro frontends isn't just an engineering conversation; it’s one that should involve product and business stakeholders as well. Is it the right choice for your organization? What benefits, risks, and tradeoffs should you weigh before committing?Serverless Event-Driven APIs with AWS Kinesis
October 24, 2024Everything that happens in an application or a software system is triggered by something. Whether it’s a user action, a sensor output, a periodic trigger, an event loop, an API call, or something else entirely — our software is governed by events. Sometimes those events are implicit, like a server that handles an HTTP request and updates a database row without ever explicitly defining it as an “entity updated” event or recording the details.Generics in Go and Effective Abstraction
October 16, 2024In the quest for better performance and easier concurrency, many backend server engineering teams are turning to Go to power their APIs and build tools. According to the Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey, Go is the 12th most popular language used extensively by professional developers — behind the heavy-hitters like JavaScript and Python, slightly ahead of Rust, and well ahead of languages like Ruby, Scala, or Elixir.Config 2024
September 5, 2024Four of our designers and design engineers had the opportunity to attend Config 2024 — here are a few of the things we took away from the experience, and more importantly the talks we’d recommend watching because we’re still thinking about them!Rust vs Go: Which Is Right For My Team?
August 29, 2024In recent years, the shift away from dynamic, high-level programming languages back towards statically typed languages with low-level operating system access has been gaining momentum as engineers seek to more effectively solve problems with scaling and reliability. Demands on our infrastructure and devices are increasing every day and downtime seems to lurk around every corner.Timing and Talking: Lessons from Working with Screen Readers
August 15, 2024Often as digital product designers we consider our job to be entirely tied to the visual medium, and spend most of our time gauging the proportions of elements on the screen, what kinds of tactile actions a user can or should be able to perform, and how best to optimize our product’s intended function, look and feel.Keep It Simple: Language as a Tool for Designers and Users
August 8, 2024Previously in this series, we discussed how to resolve conflicting accessibility best practices, and how the presentation of accessibility settings to users is as important as having them in the first place. Here, we’ll talk about the importance of simple language for designers and users both.Please Don’t Make Me Guess: A Design System Guide for Designers and Developers
August 6, 2024Vague feedback often adds a lot of frustration to the software creation process. By reducing the number of these blind spots, we could collectively stop thinking, “please don’t make me guess”.Settings and Trust: Accessible Settings Design
August 1, 2024Previously in this series, we discussed how to resolve conflicting accessibility best practices, and how we created a custom component library for a new mobile voting app named VoteHub. Here, we’ll talk a bit about the importance of trusting one’s users, and how our team created and iterated on the design for VoteHub’s accessibility settings interface.New Standards For A New Paradigm: Resolving Conflicts in Accessible Practices
July 23, 2024Voting has a robust set of best practices that do not all translate cleanly to a mobile interface. Our team resolved these conflicts with care and worked these best practices into the foundations of the VoteHub mobile voting app by way of a custom component library.
