About
I am a design engineer, which mostly means I am the person who notices that the button in the design file and the button in the codebase have quietly become different buttons.
I have spent about ten years on interfaces, most of them somebody else’s. The through line is the seam where design meets code: tokens, components, and the rules that decide what a thing looks like when nobody is looking at it directly.
I work best on products that already exist and have started to fray — the second design system, the rebuild that has to happen while the thing is still shipping. Greenfield work is more fun and teaches you less.
Before Amsterdam I was in Rotterdam, and before that I was going to be an architect. The drawings were bad and the buildings would have been worse, but the habit of drawing a thing at four scales before committing to it has been the single most useful thing I took from it.
I write here roughly monthly. If you want to talk about a project, or you disagree with something I wrote, email is the fastest way to reach me.
Work
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2024 — now
Design engineer, independent, Amsterdam
Design systems and product surfaces for teams of ten to fifty. Two clients at a time, never three.
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2021 — 2024
Staff design engineer, Fathom
Built and ran the design system behind a scheduling product used by 40,000 teams.
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2019 — 2021
Product designer, Kessel
Payments dashboards. Learned that a table is a design problem, not a data problem.
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2016 — 2019
Front-end developer, Studio Noorderlicht
Websites for museums and publishers, back when a site was still allowed to be a document.
Things I am good at
Design systems · Interface engineering · Tailwind · Accessibility · Type · Prototyping · Technical writing · Teaching