The feed

Audited focus states across sixty components this morning. The number of places where focus is simply outline: none is still the fastest way to tell whether a design system was shipped or just published.

A candidate asked me what the team is really like. I gave the honest answer, including the messy design review. She thanked me and accepted an hour later. Honesty is not a closing technique, but it does close.

“I don’t know, but here’s how I’d find out” is still the strongest sentence I hear in an interview. It tells me more than a perfect answer to a puzzle ever will.

We put the salary band and the interview loop in the job post this week. Applications are up, and the quality is up with them. The “we’ll discuss compensation later” era should be over.

The sentence I hear most from clients: “I’ve done a lot, I just don’t know how to talk about it.” You do. Write ten projects, one line each, no adjectives. The story is already in the list.

Spent the afternoon removing features from a settings page. Nobody puts that work on a roadmap and everybody notices it. Restraint is a feature with no changelog.

Three weeks into the new project and the thing I underestimated is context switching. Two protected hours before any review has done more for my output than any tool I’ve tried.

New managers: make your first one-on-one about the person, not the project. Ask what they want to be doing in a year, write it down, revisit in six months. Most people have never been asked.

The best onboarding screen I’ve designed lately is mostly empty. One question, one example, one exit. People decide whether software is on their side in the first five minutes, and we spend those minutes explaining ourselves.

“We’ll keep your CV on file” is not feedback. If the answer is no, say where the decision was made. Two sentences, and it is the last thing the candidate remembers about you.

A dashboard nobody has to fix is a data contract that works. Deleted three silent fallbacks from our pipelines this week. Every one of them was hiding a conversation we hadn’t had.

Ran a keyboard-only pass on checkout this morning and found a focus trap before QA did. The fix was four lines. Testing with a keyboard is not extra credit, it’s the job.