I think you're looking for me | Design Engineer Application

Hey Adam,

I saw your request for a Design Engineer and, after reading through the post, I'm pretty sure you're looking for me.

Why me?

Over a decade of design and engineering experience. Seven of those years were at a tech education platform where I taught Web Design and wrote the course on React.
This was my first tailwind rewrite back in pre-v1 and got rid of 97% of CSS bloat. Been a necessary part of my stack every since.
Self-taught engineer, and a quick learner. I have a system for learning and developing my skillset I have started calling The Three Es (Educate → Exercise → Evaluate). It's based on an article I wrote called a Pattern for Growth
Thrive in small team ownership roles. I have worked in small team environments, most of my career, where I was relied on to take ownership and wear lots of hats. I have also run a freelance consultancy and a custom woodworking business.
Believe shipping velocity is the heart rate of a healthy product business. I have a draft on how I have distilled my approach to keeping shipping velocity high called Shipping in Layers.

Why Tailwind?

I think the best products have strong opinions. They make it easier (externally) for a customer to identify with the product and they make it easier (internally) for us to make the best product decisions in the shortest amount of time.

I think Tailwind Labs has some strong opinions that I align with. It feels like a no brainer, and is clear even outside of "the work" we have a big value alignment.

If you're going to say yes to doing something, do it right. I heard a quote from Jason Fried "Yes is no to a thousand things", and I couldn't agree more. When I say yes it is valuable, and means I can give my full focus and effort.
Don't take yourself too seriously. We spend a lot of time at our jobs. If you can't have some fun with it, it won't be sustainable. Makes me think of an April Fools where we messed with a coworker by making his click events randomly not work in-app.
Work is important, but relationships are everything. I have worked remote my entire career. I did it to prioritize being close to family, which is the best especially with small children, but it opened so many doors to work on projects and with people I didn't think possible.

Okay, okay, but can I do the job?

I have more projects and details over in the , but I want to highlight two very different projects here real quick.

Craft Lab

This is a landing page for the community I am starting for Design Engineers. It has some small details that I like around pixel based design, but the real fun was in the generative elements.

The logo and membership cards have a randomly generated aspect to them, along with some contraints to keep the randomness still within a design direction I want them to achieve.

Built with:

Remix
Tailwind (obviously)
Framer Motion
Custom CSS for the holographic effect on the memebership card.

Landing page Source Code

Folder UI & Query Editor

This project highlights the deep product work that I am generally doing on a day-to-day basis. It is customer driven, real-world UI work. The code is all hidden in private repos, but here is an overview and we can dig deeper, if you want, when we chat.

Our product gives customers a query editor to explore their databases. The queries can also be saved for later reference. I recently noticed that it was one of our fastest growing features and needed to be reworked with a few goals in mind:

Implement ability for the queries to be organized into folders.
Search, favorites, and multi-select for folders & query navigation. Wanted to make sure state was saved to local storage too so a page refresh didn't jack up the UX.
Simplify the first version of Query Editor interface that was built and prep for the addition of charting results.
Pair with the original engineer to explain why changes were needed and make sure I wasn't making any false assumptions in the UX.

Implementing Elm

View Website

A passion project. It's an interview podcast I did while working with Elm. I only did one season, and have since taken the feed down due to ongoing costs. However, here is an episode if you want to listen.

You also mentioned how teaching will be part of the role so, in addition to what I said about my time at an education company, I will just drop this here, but feel free to check out the whole :

Meetup Talk: Building a Multi-Factor Wizard in Remix

A remote talk I gave for the Austin Remix meetup. I breakdown how I built a multi-factor wizard in Remix for CrunchyData using a fun mini-app I designed.

The Developer's Guide To Effective Networking

A pocket guide I wrote after talking to a number of people on the job search. Explores five approaches and shares real-life stories on networking that are a better fit for developers (and any creative field).

Straight To The Guide The Marketing Page

Let's wrap this up.

I have a lot more detail on each topic in the tabs above, but the goal of this summary was to give you a pretty good idea if we're on the same page. I'll end with some things I'm excited about, but I look forward to digging in and answering any Qs you have!

Growing the breadth of my skill set. I have always wanted to dive into instructional and promotional video creation, but it has never been part of my role so it fell to the wayside.
Video series ideas. Had an idea called for a couple video series. One is a "built with tailwind" show-and-tell with other design engineers. Another is a "yes you can build that with tailwind" where we show how to use tailwind to build things that are extraordinary, weird, or cool that fall outside of the TailwindUI/Catalyst look. Ex: radicaldesigncourse.com
The command palette project. I just built one from scratch for my current company CrunchyData, and it was the type of project with the perfect balance of data and design. You can check it out on the .
3D Printing and Product Design. This is going back to my Industrial Design roots. It is still in "one day..." stage. There are two accounts on instagram that are really interesting. Both hendricks_design and lao2_lab have great aesthetic, but also show the technical side of the practice as well.
There is a product opportunity here for B2B gifts. Think desk items like plaques or artwork for work anniversaries or achievements. (i.e. YouTube play button.)