About
Design engineer, Lisbon. Ten years spent mostly on the parts of a product nobody photographs.
Story
I started as a designer who kept opening the inspector, and ended up as an engineer who keeps opening Figma. The seam between the two is where almost every interesting problem I’ve worked on has lived — not in the mockup, not in the model layer, but in the argument about which of them is wrong.
The work I’m proudest of is unglamorous. A design system that got smaller and finally got used. A search box that felt instant without getting faster. A log format people read on purpose. None of it photographs well and all of it changed what a team did on a Tuesday, which is the only test I trust now.
Outside of work I build small tools and finish them. Nine of them are running, they cost me about a day a month between them, and not one has a version two planned. I think being allowed to finish things is underrated, and that most of what looks like ambition in software is an unwillingness to decide what something is.
If any of that is useful to you, the writing is where I work it out in public.
Experience
- 2024 — Now
- Principal engineer Aperture
- 2021 — 2024
- Design engineer Foldwork
- 2018 — 2021
- Front-end lead Marram
- 2016 — 2018
- Designer Studio Bell
- 2015 — 2016
- Intern Northmoor