New portfolio launch day. After a long time of keeping it aside, I finally found the time to do it. Hello 2018. ↓ icantcontrolmyego.net/

I’ve always felt that abundance makes excellence relatively rarer. Today I figured out why exactly. And it’s not doomer news, because it makes excellence also more likely:

Soundtrack composed by @the3ASiC . Visual programmed by yours truly. Enjoy.

when software had a soul there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive. the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine. software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive. the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different. nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making. somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth. A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing. now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off. and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman. now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero. which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch. when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void. this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out. here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point. AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence. the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice. if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it. that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.

Hello, here's a brain dump of everything I know about animation performance. By replacing a single global CSS variable with JS animations, I took style recalculations on a popular portfolio website down from a whopping 8ms to nanoseconds. That and much more in this post.

My work at infinite images / Toledo museum of art (📸 Richard The)

The era of "break things" is over. To make your company stand out and earn respect, you need to deliver quality experiences. And data won’t get you there. You need people to care about it, ideally at the very highest levels. Interview with @figma figma.com/blog/karri-saarine…

There is no secret sauce to making something great. It just takes a group of believers who care, who are unafraid to build and try crazy ideas. ryolu.notion.site/how-to-mak…

How much of the future will be designing for AI agents vs for humans?

Every time a sale is made on @Shopify this Black Friday weekend, it shows up on this 3D globe. It runs at 120fps in the web with a full 3D environment, physics engine, music synth, VR support, and more. It’s hard to believe it's a React app 👀🧵

I've been working on this exit animation and it's quite tricky to get right. The hardest part is, surprisingly, the z-index. I learned a neat trick from @mattgperry today that made it so much easier!

The neutral yet subtly techy vibes of Innovator Grotesk are perfect for all kinds of professional UIs.

I dislike the term ‘work-life balance’—it suggests a false dichotomy, as if work isn’t part of life. While I’m unsure what a better term would be, it shouldn’t be about merely enduring until the next break. At its best, work is a calling and truly enjoyable. However, as with any passion, you need the ability to disconnect, or it becomes a burden. For example, during my time at Uber, I really enjoyed my work, but it felt temporary. I couldn’t see myself continuing without the freedom to fully disconnect and take a full month off each summer. Europeans are much better at this. And before anyone starts talking about inefficiencies, I’d much rather work with people who don’t see their role in building something like Linear as a temporary stint.

Have you ever enjoyed the sunset shadow on a website? Here is a sneak peek of what we have been cooking with @matiasperz_ at @basementstudio : 🔗 daylightcomputer.com/ 📝 Article coming soon

for the last years i have been creating 3d campaigns for brands. today that changes: i am not taking more client work. cannot wait to create crazy interactive stuff at my new project desktop.fm

By popular demand… I want to publish my Wiggle Bones library for @threejs As an experiment I am creating a crowdfunding campaign to support its development You can read more play with those wiggly models at → wiggle.xl.digital What do you think about it?

Patrick Collison, Stripe CEO, on why quality matters: "If Stripe is a monstrously successful business but what we make isn't beautiful and Stripe doesn't embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I'll be much less happy. My intuition is that more of Stripe's success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things. Because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well, it tells you the person who made it really cared."

People asking what taste is, or is there a framework –– It's knowing what good looks like. Person who has taste in certain things, can find good things, create good things and point out how something needs to change to make it good. Jiro from Jiro Dreams of Sushi:

📢 I'll be available for React Native contracts from September ☞ grifo.tv ⚛️📱🍎🤖🌍🔥 Remote or onsite in London. DM me if interested 🤝 #reactnative #react #typescript #graphql #softwareengineer #frontend #ios #android #expo