HN user
User experience & product designer solving interesting problems by putting people first—from product vision to the last 5%.
quinnkeast.com | hey@quinnkeast.com
I’m deaf and just got a pair of Even G2 glasses, which have a live captioning mode and no camera. They’re already lifechanging, even if they come with the risk of being taken away at any moment if the company shuts down or discontinues support.
A cold application just means that the candidate applied directly with no referral or introduction. It’s always been the case that both warm and cold applications went though the same interview processes, maybe just with a different first conversation. The argument is that there’s no way to get to a first conversation without already knowing someone who can provide the warm introduction.
All the time in Germany.
Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions…
Which needs to be done intentionally in context, not homogeneously as a rapid output of a generative tool.
Figma is targeted towards designers who create thoughtful design systems and cohesive UIs and who don't code, while this is targeted towards vibe coders who can't design. Two different circles that intersect to some level.
The challenge is that this sets an expectation of what "design" is, de-valuing the former and shifting us culturally towards the latter and a space where "design" is seen as a subjective visual exercise with little intrinsic value.
The problem is right now management is not only insisting on their team vibe-coding bespoke replacements, they’re avoiding paying for other SaaS because they can vibe-code their own replacements, often themselves, and they’ve lost sight of that they probably don’t want to be responsible for it.
Arguably that’s the “operations” and “relationship” parts described here. But right now, many companies are choosing to not pay for software because they can build a solution themselves.
As far as cookie popups go (and recognizing you probably know this so it’s more a general comment), GDPR doesn’t encode cookie popups into law, but the entire industry follows the pattern of cookie popups in response to the underlying requirement of informed consent. Companies could choose to not collect as much info, or take other approaches, but cookie popups are the default.
Personally, been making a low fidelity exalidraw-like calendar app: https://letswalnut.com.
There’s a real-time collaborative workspace-oriented version, too.
Professionally, working on “Magic Draft,” a feature in Ditto to help designers and writers create the “draft and a half” directly in Figma, which uses a hierarchy of all your context (text, Ditto metadata, the design, your style guides, etc) to write really good starting point copy.
There’s a similar post that I can’t find that relates to ornamentation and detail in infrastructure as simple as a pole on a sidewalk – an ornate and designed pole replaced with a simple round post. Perhaps someone else remembers the source.
I want to give a go at learning to make chocolate.
Some highlights from this year include:
- The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Devils by Joe Abercrombie
- A Frog In The Fall (And Later On) by Linnea Sterte (A graphic novel)
Overall I'm at 65 books on the year—I maintain a reading list[1] on my personal site that has the rest.
Also, here's an example of a collaborative public calendar from the "workspace" version! Anyone can pop in and make changes and see what others are doing.
https://app.letswalnut.com/calendars/0eff8913-6416-40c0-bae1...
Ditto | Product Designer | Remote (US/Canada) | $140-200K + early team member equity
Ditto helps teams manage their copy from design to production with a single source of truth. Over 3,600 teams (from Fortune 500 companies to startups!) currently use Ditto.
We're hiring our second product designer to help to define and design our core product, from strategy to execution. As the second designer on our team, you’ll have an outsized impact on defining not only what Ditto is and how it works, but what we do next.
Ditto is a design-driven company. Our design function has high ownership around identifying and shaping problem spaces, exploring solutions, and helping to drive implementation. We don’t have a product function—instead, both design and engineering own the product lens. We think this is critical for Ditto’s product, which used by design and engineering teams in their day-by-day workflows.
More info and to apply: https://www.dittowords.com/careers/product-designer
What’re you seeing? Seems to be working from my end.
- One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford - Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
I keep a reading list at quinnkeast.com/reading. Would love to see others’ if any has one to share!
Ditto | Product Designer | Remote (US/Canada) | $140-200K + early team member equity
Ditto helps teams manage their copy from design to production with a single source of truth. Over 3600 teams (from Fortune 500 companies to startups!) currently use Ditto.
We're hiring our second product designer to help to define and design our core product, from strategy to execution. As the second designer on our team, you’ll have an outsized impact on defining not only what Ditto is and how it works, but what we do next.
Ditto is a design-driven company. Our design function has high ownership around identifying and shaping problem spaces, exploring solutions, and helping to drive implementation. We don’t have a product function—instead, both design and engineering own the product lens. We think this is critical for Ditto’s product, which used by design and engineering teams in their day-by-day workflows.
More info and to apply: https://www.dittowords.com/careers/product-designer
In 2022, I sent out some then-new Midjourney generations with the caption: If this doesn’t revolutionize design, I don’t know what will.
That’s not design, that’s an image.
Some more technically-oriented learnings here!
Using curved, matching quotation marks is typographic design and style, as is using hyphens, en, and em dashes correctly in context. Many tools will automatically use the correct typographic symbols in context in the same way they’ll automatically insert periods and spaces in response to double-spacing. And even setting that aside—typographic style is a long-standing craft of design. Why would we want to let LLMs take that away from us?
Does the 15-year period for non-US developers only apply to developers? What about roles like designers, product managers, and so on?
Still, it's a bit ironic that your own website advises people to use bots to get apartments (thus bypassing the work put into the adverts and apartment hunting sites), whilst also decrying bots who would bypass your site.
I believe these are pretty different scenarios. There's an ongoing, massive shortage of apartments in Berlin, and bots here often aren't bypassing "work put into adverts and apartment hunting sites"—they're trying to get an application in at all before the listing is flooded with hundreds of applications and disabled. The content of the application has nothing to do with it.
(Of course, this just leads to an arms race of apartment-application-bots, but this is the situation the city's found itself in. Same goes for registration appointments, residence permit applications, and so on.)
Video to accompany the paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azDaPm13CT8
I’d love to read this collection of reviews!
I had an interview cut short early once because the interviewer said “I have to make sure we’re allowed to hire you.”
This was in Germany.
Ultimately, accommodations help but they don’t place me on even ground: they still single me out and make people consider whether I’m capable based on accessibility, not skill.
I'm deaf and rely on real-time captions for calls. In an in-person interview scenario, I'm at a huge disadvantage and not able to perform at my best. In a video call, I'm on equal ground.
It's not as simple as "requiring people to be able to interact with other people."
Makes sense—thanks for sharing this!
Apparently the title was edited since I posted it—it was originally about the same as the article.
The thing I haven't figured out (mostly because I haven't sat down and done so) is how I'd access mail and such—without my password manager on my own phone, I don't have access to anything.