Seems like every week someone new joins the crew at FreshBooks. At a place growing so rapidly, it’s not uncommon for a preference towards predictability and specialization. In that context, striving to be both a designer and developer is increasingly like swimming upstream.

:raising_hand: Recently, I was asked:

So how come u dont like being a full time developer, it pays better no? :P

After a few moments, I replied:

Good question - I guess the dev knowledge does help with salary stuff, but when I look at the field as a whole, the most interesting work is being done at the places where engineering and design are woven together.

I’d like to make interesting things one day :)

Many more moments later (like weeks), I remembered that there was more to it. In 2011, Ryan Singer from Basecamp did a Peepcode learning video where he used design to solve a client problem, while also scaffolding out a rails app to validate the design and build a real product at the same time.

I was spellbound.

I still am. That level of journeyman mastery is still the thing I strive for.

:clap:

While writing this I also stumbled on another fantastic talk of his from 2010 about weaving design and development.

It’s still just as relevant today as it was then.

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I took a break from coding Tello last week to noodle around with watercolors. Here’s one of the things I did. It’s far from good, or finished, but that’s okay.

Despite the amateur results, dipping my toes in the world of real paints and brushes is always totally worth it.

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Brent Simmons’ recent post, How to Be Wrong on the Internet, got me thinking about why I don’t write or share as much as I should.

Over a decade ago, I was able to backpack around Eastern China primarily because of three friends I met through blogging. Monsoons, nightclubs, falling-outs and food poisoning - it was a pretty cool adventure for a 20 year old.

I wasn’t a particularly great writer or artist. Nothing I ever published went beyond a small circle of readers I considered confidantes. But I put myself out there and things seemed to work out.

I stopped for lots of reasons, probably. If I’m being honest, I can’t really recall.

But somewhere along the way I started being overly self-critical, believing that anything I put out had to be correct and perfect.

I prefer the way Brent thinks about it:

I’m constantly wrong on the internet. Here’s how I think about it:

Blogging is, for me, part of the process of getting to the truth.

Everything is provisional — it’s what I think now, and I might change my mind in a year. Or in a day. Or in a minute, when somebody posts (or tweets) more or better information or has a solid argument.

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If you haven’t used it before, Trello is a web-based tool to organize the things from life to project collaboration. We use it at work to track sprint backlogs, I use it at home as a project planner and todo list. It’s pretty sweet, except for one thing…

Say you’ve got a brilliant idea for where to go on your next vacation. You’ve been choosing between destinations and planning your itinerary with your friend on a shared Trello board. Normally, you’d have to go to trello.com, open your vacation board, find the right list, click to add an item, and then type it out.

I started working on Tello App so that all you’d need to do is hit a keyboard shortcut, type “Mykonos, Greece”, and get back to your life. Small victories my friend.

The design’s still pretty early (I’d love your feedback), but I’ve already started scaffolding out the app. Native development is new to me though and Tello has a little bit of everything – communicating with a server API, parsing JSON, token security, saving data to coredata, and drawing some views.

I’m enjoying Swift, but not so much Cocoa yet. So far, this stack of seemingly simple things is being made complex by edge cases and inexperience. But I guess that’s how it always is.

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