Hey, I'm Alex — a design engineer with 12 years of making software feel like something.

Right now I lead UX for developer tools at Marriott International, designing the internal platforms that engineering teams use to ship infrastructure.

Before that, I spent years inside agencies, dev shops, and startups — wearing every hat, shipping everything from brand systems to full product builds. Somewhere in the middle I started a design collective called Collectively Made.

My Book

Recent

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The Ladder, Pulled Up

Taste is the moat. Fine. But taste was always downstream of reps, and AI has eaten the reps. A working theory of what the new apprenticeship has to look like.
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We Swapped the Motor

AI has removed the friction that kept my ideas theoretical — and confronted me with the harder question of what's actually worth building.
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Dad's Eulogy

The eulogy I gave for my father, Daniel Russell, on October 5th during the Jewish High Holidays.
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A Local-First UX Research Workflow in Cursor

How I stopped copying interview notes into chat windows and built a research pipeline that lives in my codebase, processes transcripts automatically, and compounds over time.
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What Does UX Mean When Your Users Are Engineers?

Designing for developers means throwing out half the UX playbook and replacing ease with something harder to achieve: trust.
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Design Systems Are Not a Product

On the quiet trap of treating your component library like a startup, and why the best design system is the one you forget about.