Blog

Notes on design, product, and building apps.

AI and ML Design Resources for UX Designers
I’ve come across a few really good resources for UX Designers getting into or involved in designing for complex apps and AI-enabled software. Let me know of other great links and I will add them to th…
29 Dec 2025
A Practical Introduction to AI Agents
How they work, why they matter, and what you should know before building one AI agents are quickly becoming one of the most talked-about developments in applied AI. But despite the buzz, many people a…
12 Dec 2025
Software Engineering Is Still Writing Letters By Hand
Every now and then a new technology arrives that completely breaks the assumptions of the world around it. Not gently. Not politely. Not in a way that leaves existing workflows intact. It shows up lik…
11 Dec 2025
Adaptive Learning for AI Agents
As AI agents become more autonomous and take on increasingly complex tasks, adaptive learning becomes a core requirement. Adaptive learning is the ability to update behaviour based on new information.…
10 Dec 2025
Designing Agents
I’ve recently been working on an agentic fraud alert review system for a bank, where our agent monitors transaction alerts and reviews the transaction against context of the bank account as well as an…
13 Nov 2025
A User-First Approach to AI Strategy
“Enterprise AI strategy” is something you’d find on a consultant’s slide deck with lots of arrows, maybe a few buzzwords, and a roadmap that stretches into some hazy, futuristic quarter where everythi…
25 Oct 2025
The Railways of AI: Building Tracks That Actually Go Somewhere
Sangeet Paul Choudary has written an interesting piece on The problem with agentic AI in 2025. The article argues that while agentic AI (systems that act autonomously rather than simply assist) holds …
19 Oct 2025
Product Designer Portfolio Tips
I have reviewed about 100 product designer portfolios in the last couple of weeks for 2 open midweight product designer roles we have at Faculty. I want to help product designers get jobs. These 100 p…
26 Sept 2025
Good Models Die in Notebooks
In large consulting projects and enterprise AI programs, too many AI and data science projects follow the same unhelpful pattern. A team of data scientists works for months in notebooks, training and …
12 Aug 2025
Thumbs Up to the Humans in the Loop
Back in the early days of building apps, when we were still deploying things with FTP and debugging with alert(), one of the most thrilling moments was just watching someone use your thing. Not a simu…
1 Aug 2025
Vibe Coding is Changing the Way Code is Coded
The other night, I built a working app prototype in a single sitting to transform json into a format I wanted. Just prompts and a few tweaks. It kind of blew my mind. It got me thinking about how peop…
25 Jul 2025
A Tailwind Colour Palette Generator for Design Engineers
One of the first problems I encountered as a design engineer was sales teams wanting custom demos of software products. They were talking to large enterprise clients, and having a slick demo in client…
10 Jun 2025
From Designer to Design Engineer: A Practical Guide for Getting Started
Transitioning from designer to design engineer can feel like stepping into a whole new world—new tools, new workflows, and a lot of unfamiliar terminology. If you’re a visual designer who’s learning t…
5 May 2025
Design Engineers Are the Future of Product Development
In the past, product development followed a familiar pattern: designers created static mockups, handed them off to engineers, and hoped for the best. Too often, something vital was lost in translation…
30 Apr 2025
Why you should listen to your superusers over your metrics
Most users don’t care about your product. That might sound harsh, but hear me out. For the vast majority of people, your app is just another utility — something they open, tap around in, and close wit…
22 Apr 2025
The End of a Meme
You’ve probably seen the meme. On one side, there’s a gorgeous, promised land of design. On the other, a sad, broken version of that same screen — stretched buttons, misaligned text, the whole thing j…
11 Apr 2025
Let Users Touch the Product: Designing for Agency
Too many apps and digital products treat users like passive observers. They surface dashboards, deliver reports, and walk users through prescribed paths. But they stop short of what really builds enga…
3 Apr 2025
The Technical Service Blueprint: Bridging UX and Engineering
In many digital projects, user experience (UX) and technical architecture are treated as separate tracks. Designers focus on flows and interactions, while engineers dive into APIs, data models, and pe…
21 Mar 2025
Thinking beyond chat interfaces for human-agent interaction
From Chat to Click Chat-based interfaces are the go-to solution for agent interactions, helping new users of agent systems navigate complex workflows. Chat is a flexible interface, and can return diff…
15 Mar 2025
Good Design = Great First Impressions: How UI Can Win (or Lose) Customers
Ever landed on a website or opened an app and immediately felt meh? Maybe it looked outdated, cluttered, or just didn’t feel easy to use. Now think of a time when you landed somewhere and instantly th…
11 Feb 2025