About

“If you're going to do it,
do it right.”

My dad's refrain before any project. He laid brick for a living; I ship software. The rule transfers.

I'm Alex — a design engineer with 12 years of making software feel like something. I lead UX for developer tools at Marriott International, designing the internal platforms engineering teams use to ship infrastructure. Before that: agencies, dev shops, startups, and a design collective called Collectively Made.

This site is the workshop, not the showroom. Essays argue a position, experiments are the lab work, and the two link to each other on purpose.

What I believe

Anyone can claim a perspective. Each of these comes with a receipt.

Taste is residue, not talent.

It's what's left over after the reps — the 11pm grid audits, the hundred bad prototypes. The moat everyone says will save designers was built by work we just automated away. That should worry us more than it does.

Receipt The Ladder, Pulled Up

Real beats rendered.

A working prototype on a URL ends arguments that a mockup can only start. Build the thing real enough to fight over.

Receipt We Swapped the Motor

The best design system is the one you forget about.

Roads don't get feature roadmaps. Infrastructure is measured by what it enables, not what it contains.

Receipt Design Systems Are Not a Product

For experts, trust beats delight.

An engineer clicking 'Provision' doesn't want magic — they want to believe what happens next. That's a harder thing to design than friendly.

Receipt What Does UX Mean When Your Users Are Engineers?

Friction is a feature — when it's chosen.

Some actions should cost a deliberate pause. We cut accidental infrastructure provisions in half by making a button harder to press.

Receipt Hold to Provision

Context should compound.

Notes that don't accumulate are notes you'll write again. Every system I build tries to start the next piece of work at step 40, not step 1.

Receipt The Claude Code + Obsidian Vault Pattern

Start here

First visit? Four pieces, in this order.

Now

Writing: Designing with AI — the book
Chewing on: Where the next generation's taste comes from, now that AI has eaten the reps
Building: This site, in public — experiments and all
Listening: Dad's records. The collection keeps growing

Updated June 10, 2026 · by hand, for now.