Every freelancer in my area is, by this definition, a "Desingineer." I'm in the midwest, so there's almost no other way to get work other than go full stack. Obviously, some are better at the back end and some are better designers, but they have to do it all.
Honestly, this reinforces the issue that startups do a poor job of recruiting outside of their 20 mile radius. For example, its early in the office, and I still see 5 people who have pushed high level applications, good front ends, and the occasional mobile app.
have built a company in the middle of the country as well, and know this freelance type. Typically they are "okay" at design and "okay" at development. They work well for local small businesses but not for startups looking for top caliber design.
Most startups aren't looking for, and shouldn't be looking for, top caliber design. It costs too much and usually provides no measurable value for an immature product.
I agree with jsavimbi. If you're able to hire specialists, then do it. But, if you're looking to get multiple roles out of the same person, you should be willing to take the pros and cons.
Also, if you're in the situation where you have to hire generalists instead of specialists, you are likely a small business, rather than a high growth startup. If you have a war chest and are looking to scale, it's a mistake not to hire specialists -- you as the business owner should be able to tie everything together, not an employee.
I agree with this, however, what constitutes a "designer?"
Defining an engineer is easy: can build systems that optimize for function. Can build a UI that the user can understand to the point that the user can gain value.
How do you quantify design? How do you quantify a designer? If we had metrics, then it would be easier to understand which freelancers actually are "Desingineers."
i don't think designers, per se, are that valuable.
this line of thought just stems from the conflation of graphic design and interface design. the skill in demand is the latter. to be good at it one needs to be able to be proficient in html, css, javascript, and have basic abilities in whatever server-side technologies are in use.
so, yes, these folks will be hard to find. just like any other good engineer, they'll either have a job, be kicking ass, or doing their own thing. c'est la vie. try offering a wage they can't refuse.
interface design. the skill in demand is the latter. to be good at it one needs to be able to be proficient in html, css, javascript, and have basic abilities in whatever server-side technologies are in use.
I really don't follow. A kick-ass interface designer can know nothing more than Photoshop. A front-end guru can be terrible at interface design. There's very little connection between interface design and the technologies used to implement it.
I'd never hire a designer that valued Photoshop skills above problem solving, design thinking and usability. Photoshop should be just a tool for a designer. I think as that is where the end product usually comes from, it's seen as the skill that you're buying as an employer. Anyone can learn Photoshop, it's extremely simple, it's design thinking that separates the men from the boys.
The best designers will know HTML+CSS+Javascript pretty intimately for a variety of reasons.
Can you name a few? I work with an absolutely brilliant designer who can't write a lick of HTML/JS/CSS however he intimately understands how his designs will translate to a browser.
There's very little connection between interface design and the technologies used to implement it.
For starters, whatever you design in Photoshop typically looks 10-30% different in the browser when converted to HTML. That is significant enough to make the concept look very different than the actual browser interface implementation.
An interface designer who only operates in Photoshop thus cannot deliver accurate-looking concepts.
whatever you design in Photoshop typically looks 10-30% different in the browser when converted to HTML
HTML isn't the culprit here. Any design done in a static medium is going to change when actually implemented on a device, for a platform. But it could just as easily be Flash as HTML. Good designers understand and account for the target medium (flexible sizes, variable fonts etc).
Also I reject your initial hypothesis. With a knowledgeable designer's design I can get a pixel perfect HTML implementation. If your design changes 30% just in the implementation then your designer doesn't understand the medium very well.
theoretically, you could just use photoshop (or keynote, more realistically) to design interfaces. however, given that from there someone has to take over and implement it using the real technologies, it is easy to miss things and the process becomes hopelessly slow. i guess it is theoretically possible to operate like this.
contrast that to being able to rapidly iterate on the real code.
i don't mean iterate as in "code a feature, commit to the repo, send for review, do over". i mean the tweaking while coding.
I'm not sure it's true anymore. The way something looks is important, but so is how it responds to user actions. This probably started with flash around 2001 i.e. flat graphics were not acceptable anymore but now designers don't have keyframes to tween so knowing css and javascript to manipulate user interactions is essential for UI these days. Even for mobile dev, designers should have prototypes to demo to devs about how an interface responds to interactions.
I wouldn't devalue graphic design as the parent did. There's room for a lot of improvement in the graphic design — what's often derisively called "just the way it looks" — of most digital products. Graphic/visual designers were somewhat restrained by low resolutions and slow GPUs. Evolving display technology will give rise to better graphic design both in the web and other digital products.
Good interface designers should definitely know the basics of the technologies used to implement their creations, in the same way industrial designers are expected to have some understanding of materials and manufacturing processes. It's often said that designers thrive on constraints: a designer does his best work when he knows the limitations of his tools, and works with their limitations and defects to create something useful instead of pursuing some impossible level of perfection. Designers, too, have to ship, and they ship best when they know what's behind the facade.
When people talk about 'interface design', it seems they rarely mean anything more than where on the page to place the navigation... The crux being that we all assume a set of priors, and everyone asks "how do we make doing this easier?" instead of the more fundamental "what does the user want done?" I don't think that skill is necessarily related to other forms of design -- it's just a case of taking a step back.
As a desingineer I'm always looking for the mythical startup that has cool technology, awesome people and a good chance to rocket to the moon. Probably as hard to find as desingineers.
That's awesome. Of course, if we just want money, prestige, and success, then that is what we want. But if we want opportunities to grow, then the startup should be a challenge demanding our best to achieve success --- it should not be an easy ride on others' abilities. And the same goes for finding the desingineer --- if a founder wants to address a prime responsibility of running a company, and control their culture, then part of their legacy is the people that they help grow and to flourish into the desingineer.
I think the problem is not that one person can't have both of these skills, but that it is hard to play both roles on the same project unless you have a lot of discipline.
The engineering mindset and the UX design mindset optimize for different things. Even if you are excellent at both, it helps to have someone else forcing you to get the UX right when you're doing the engineering work, and to make the engineering possible when doing the design work.
The people who can do both at the same time don't differ in having both skills -- lots of people have them -- but in having the discipline to optimize for both in alternation.
Engineering and UX can go hand in hand. What clashes is User-Centred UX and (sometimes) business objectives.
When engineers and UX people work together, it is bliss as both provide a piece of the puzzle, can't see why one person can't do both.
You're probably also not making two salaries' worth for doing two roles worth of work. But I know, you guys don't go into startups for the money, right.
I find the reason it's hard to do both on the same project is that the engineer by definition knows the internals of the system. It's hard to un-know that and see things afresh from the user perspective. Thus one tends to create UIs that are intuitive to someone who already has a mental model of how the system works, but seem convoluted and arbitrary to everybody else.
This is a good idea. I'm going to try to do it on my next project. I don't know if I can stop thinking about the data and implementation. It is just where my mind naturally goes. Someone presents me with some type of data and a way they want to present it and I immediately start thinking about data representation, persistent storage, data abstraction models.
I think more important is just to get out of the engineering mindset and try to think like a user. I bet just sitting down with a non-technical person and working through the UI design would help a lot to keep me from going into my engineering mindset.
There are some people that have both but it is extremely rare as the author points out. Being a hack or OK in design and development is not the same, many people can do that. I think he is pointing out the very small circle of extremely gifted individuals who can legitimately do both on a professional level.
As in any profession there will always be some extraordinary individuals that are heads and toes above the rest.
I agree, there are a lot of people that can both very well and to be honest most contractors have to be able to if they want to get work.
I don't think that the skill set required is actually that different, but your right in saying discipline is required in order to excel in both.
Then I think the key point is those that do possess both skills and the discipline/drive to excel at both are usually either doing very well doing their own thing and aren't looking for work.
A lot of people can do passable jobs on both roles, but I've never met someone who was awesome on the backend that was also a great UX designer. Likewise, the best designers can whip up a new UI in an afternoon, but it might take them a couple weeks to get it coded.
Maybe, but requiring both skills to be "great" and "awesome" in order to be anything more than "passable" is a little unfair, no? Are there situations for which "passable" is indeed doing a good job?
And yes, it often takes longer to code features than it does to draw and place their UI elements.
My point was that most good coders can implement a designer's UI a lot faster than the UI designers.
For almost all situations I think you are better off getting two developers with complementing skills rather than two jack-of-all-trades that can do "everything". If you can only afford one person then seriously consider how to contract out some tricky parts of the weaker skills to an expert. Then you have a good foundation to build on.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
but that it is hard to play both roles on the same project unless you have a lot of discipline.
For me it's less of a discipline issue and more of a time issue.
Both the backend and the frontend take a lot of quality time to do them right. It's simply not effective to have a single person context-switch between them, even when said person is very good at both. I.e. this is one of the situations where two people can indeed produce a given result nearly twice as fast.
However, I also agree that on top of that discipline plays a role, too.
While wearing the engineer-hat you have to constantly force yourself to stick with the brain-damaged abstractions that comprise todays "state-of-the-art" and not give in to the urge of fixing them bottom-up.
I.e. when both front- and backend are in your hands then the temptation to make the frontend truly model-driven can quickly become overwhelming (auto-generate those stupid forms and validations! why mirror when we could just rpc!). Sadly more often than not this results in a huge time-sink, as you embark in an uphill battle against a tool-chain that's strongly optimized for the exact opposite.
This is the best comment so far, I think, because it highlights why a designer + engineer, even a theoretical 'designeneer' equally skilled at both, isn't necessarily going to be twice as valuable, and in fact may be only as valuable as a single engineer or a single designer.
I believe strongly in the value that knowing both can give you, and for certain classes of small project it's a huge win.
But you're right: context-switching is a limiter. You only have so much free time and mental energy.
For me, I know that I prefer working with competent UX/visual design guidance. I can get some really pretty results from doing my own designs, but it's a wonderful freedom to know that I'll spend 15 minutes in the morning iterating on a piece of paper with a designer today, and then just go away and do my thing. I'll get a PSD that will make the prototype UI more concrete late-afternoon, and the next morning we can talk about how using the UI makes us want to change it.
But if I was doing it all myself? I doubt that even with twice the time, the overall result would be equal, either on the code or the design side.
That designer keeps all of his visual design acumen and photoshop 'muscle memory' loaded into cache.
I keep my emacs key-chords, the code's secret sauce, my bash and git aliases and the topography of staging environments loaded into my cache.
There are definitely projects that exist where you can 'do it all', but ... node.js' model is great for maximizing throughput, but when you've got drastically different types of work, that's what you have multiple cores for. ;)
100% agreed. That's why I couldn't believe the upvote fest on the "anti-Product Guys" post a while back. When you do it all, you quickly learn that it's absolutely exhausting work.
More than just the same work 2x, but more like 3x or 4x because of holding it ALL in your head and trying to balance it.
I had the same experiences you did. So, while I'm a good back-end developer, and a great front-end developer, I've chosen to focus on design because A) I'm amazing at it -- it's my best skill, so that is the best use of my energy, B) I don't have the time or energy to do it all any more.
That said, I do still pay attention to the overall shape of the code (and my husband/biz partner pays attention to the design).
Several times, I've been able to wade into a drawn-out discussion between my biz partner and one of our freelancers, & cut thru the crap with a beautifully architected solution. Which always makes me feel warm & fuzzy. And they look at me and go "Oh yeah, you DO know what you're doing," which is worth it just for that. (Because my biz partner has this irritating tendency to tell me "that's impossible" as if he forgot that I damn well know it isn't ;)
Being entirely wrapped up in the code OR the design can be dangerous. ("That's impossible!" - ha.)
I wouldn't trade my ability to do both for anything. I'm glad my husband & I are both "desingineers," at slightly different mix percentages.
Re: "brain-damaged abstractions" - you reminded me of a coworker who could be called a "designeer" (he's a good programmer but he also does decent UI/UX).
The problem is, he ignores deadlines because he hates the brain dead abstractions and bad code, and decides to unilaterally refactor.
I feel sorry for him because I understand that he can't stand the sloppy code, he is working with nimrods and mediocre people (and awful tools), what he should do is quit. (some of the mediocre code is, I admit, mine, I've stopped caring and I just want to build a nest egg to quit)
Agreed. It's hard to switch gears from being head deep in back end code to thinking about and approaching a problem in terms of design. Maybe if you can spend one day coding and the next designing...
Unless I'm working for myself I find I rarely have this freedom. This is why I left my last startup. If I'm trying to do both there are too many things that I'm accountable for on a daily basis to the boss, who in my experience doesn't want me to stop coding to "waste a day" designing.
And in the end I feel like I just end up doing a half-assed job on both. More power to those who can do the switcheroo, be excellent in both, and keep the writer-of-paychecks happy!
Definitely the best way is to not work in little nibbles but long stretches, like a day or two on each. Otherwise you're going to drive yourself insane! (As you've learned.)
"Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"
When the organization structure of a project is 'there's just one guy who does it all', the software architecture will tend towards 'the big ball of code' pattern.
However, if the team on a project has people who are engineers, and people who are designers, then a designineer might be a useful product manager to help balance conflicting engineering and UX requirements.
In a startup, looking for a first hire engineer, you probably want someone who will grow into that role - but it's a mistake to have your first system built by them and them alone, because you'll almost inevitably wind up with a big ball of code.
In general, all software should be built by at least two people collaborating, to force some division of responsibility, which will (via Conway's Law) force some structure.
(as you say, the best developers are disciplined and capable of structuring systems in the absence of a forcing structure. This is maybe because they divide work logically into units, and therefore find themselves collaborating with their past- and future-self, giving the structural effect of team work. But apply pressure to even a great developer and that discipline can break down.)
I don't know if I agree with this. It seems like the more people there are working on a project, the more likely you will end up with a complicated ball of code. The reason being is people generally aren't working with the same mental model on the system they are implementing. So, some of the engineers will think its obvious to do things one way, and others will do the opposite. It doesn't make sense for complete rewrites when the other engineer reviews the code, so you end up with inconsistencies in the code. At that point there is no real way to look at the code in a coherent fashion. It doesn't completely make sense to the first or second engineer. It has become a complicated ball of code.
If we accept the initial premise that designers who are also engineers are as rare as ninja-unicorns, then surely the logical thing to do is to turn them into managers?
I was an artist most life and learned engineering when I was 20. It was extremely difficult but I did well and graduated at the top of my class. I can still draw and paint, but creating beautiful web interfaces is very hard for me. Like you're saying, it's not for lack of ability. It's a curse of knowledge.
When you design a UI as an engineer, you're thinking long term. Like make the whole thing white so that new features can be added in easily. Also, the logo is going to need to look good on white anyway for email footers, Facebook apps, etc..., so just make header background white. Then you may have integrations with third-party widgets. All will support white best.
Also, things that 'look' good often are not usable. Like text below 11px, and low contrast shades of text may not be visible to older folks. I see this stuff all the time on sites with 'awesome' design.
Also, images for backgrounds, corners, buttons etc... slow the page load down and don't allow for easy extensibility or iterating. So if I can't do it with CSS, I don't do it.
Page load time, non-buginess, and iteration leading to smooth functionality are the most important parts of UX, IMO. Making the site look like a piece of art does none of these, but I think art gets confused with UX too often. Do you visit this site for the beautiful design? How about Google or Facebook?
If you spend the time to do beautiful design and functionality like Apple, you can create something where the beauty does not detract from usability. But, that takes somewhere on the order of 10x the resources since they're doing 10 prototype designs, refining 3 of them, and only keeping one. If you're trying to create a market, then that makes sense. However, if you're trying to create the most useful product in an existing market, then you're wasting time IMO.
I've been working hard at being this guy. HTML+CSS+JS(coffee!)+Ruby, years of professional experience doing UX and website design on whiteboards and Photoshop and Illustrator, successfully launching brand-new projects.
I also know a few guys I've worked with that are very strong in the same areas. It's more pleasurable to work with a team where every member will do well in all areas, even if we have a core area that we would prefer to be an expert in. I don't believe those people are mythical or hard to find.
The myth is that startups want those people, but don't have enough money to afford them. They want desingineers that are cheap. I'm personally tired of seeing "stock options" in startups that don't have a product yet.
you should try splitting it into (i) a designer who does HTML, CSS (ii) a programmer and (iii) perhaps even a separate Javascript coder.
This is how the company I work for right now does it and it is EXTREMELY inefficient. I've been advocating them to go back to one person to do html/css/js/php.
I can see the above work for large orgs. But with a 3-4 person tech team, super specialization has not worked at all
What's inefficient about it? Usually this doesn't work if your process sucks. The way I've seen it work well is:
Designer starts on the project a week ahead of programmer. Gathers requirements (with the programmer tagging along). Does paper sketches which get a general a-ok from everyone.
Does html prototype, ideally already in rails.
Hands off to developer, developer wires up. Over time they iterate together on the same codebase.
So in your model there is only a designer and a developer? At my work, we have someone for each specialty: 1. design 2. html 3. backend like php 4. js.
Your designer seems to do both (1) and (2) which is more manageable and something I've had work well. Likewise, your programmer seems to do both (3) and (4).
The problems arise when you need to tweak a small feature. You end up needing four-five people(if you count product manager) to touch it to make the change happen. It's not efficient at least for a web start-up(I can see it work for larger enterprises).
Pretty sure badclient said that the company has one person each for HTML, CSS, JS and PHP.
That does sound pretty nuts - seems like almost every layout/front-end/design change you'd ever need to make would touch both HTML and CSS, requiring two people to handle it separately.
My partner does: UI/UX design, HTML and JavaScript and a dash of backend. I do: backend, architecture, algorithms, sysadmin work and HTML + JavaScript when necessary.
It works really well. We also continuously try to expand to the others territory.
Anyone on here have any insights on HOW to get there?
IME, you need certain attitudes towards life to get good at both.
You need to be a visionary AND an engineer. Usually people are one or the other and prefer it because they suck less at it. Hence, they eventually get great at it. But this means the other suffers. To be in the designer+engineer category, you first need to figure out what you are good at (essentially what you spend a large chunk of your time on - dreaming or coding) and then what you are weak at.
Then practice doing the weak thing for a couple of years.
Pretty soon, you are a designeer.
Problem is, in the startup world, I still can't figure out WHY you should be both when you can hire people to complement your weakness. Steve Jobs was obviously only a visionary and he, through practice, became great at it. Dennis Ritchie, an engineer.
Unless, of course, startup is not your endgame. Unless your goal is self-improvement powered by a zesty thirst for knowledge. In my limited knowledge, though Learnado Da Vinci fell into the designeer category, he was still very much an idea person (visionary) than an engineer - mainly because he procrastinated like crazy with his projects (for years, at times). This shows that he preferred conceptualizing the project and loved cultivating the vision rather than actually implement it.
Thoughts? Please give me some feedback, this stuff is important.
Jobs was not "only" a visionary. Before Apple, Jobs worked at Atari as a technician. He would get assigned tasks like designing circuit boards. If you consider the early days, Jobs only looks like a business guy if you stand him next to Woz.
Anyway, I think I can say without exaggeration that I'm better than average in both engineering and design. At least for me, I think you have to be born that way -- you get pleasure both from aesthetics, and from solving problems. And when left alone by a world that sees both as separate, you just do your thing.
I started got a computer when I was 11. Other people played games. It seemed completely natural to me to spend almost all my time programming pretty graphics demos.
But how do you get any better? I think you have to be the kind of person who seeks challenges, who seeks a ladder to climb.
For computing, I think we all know that drill. Open source has made it so that you can start anywhere and go all the way to OS development, if that's what you want. You can also get work (even if you have little experience) and use other people's resources to educate yourself.
For design, it's a bit harder. Perhaps I was lucky in that I continually wavered between science and engineering, and design and journalism.
In my teens and early 20s, I was the production/layout guy at student newspapers. So I could educate myself, with thousands of dollars of other people's money, in a way that was almost ridiculously unsupervised. That sharpened my appreciation for typography, photography, design, etc., as well as gave me some experience managing people, budgets and deadlines. But I guess that other people in that role might not have gone as crazy as I did for the design aspect. Especially for the entertainment sections (where design was allowed to be more fun) I was trying to top myself with every single issue that I did. You know that you're doing it right when (a) the bloody thing actually makes printing deadline, week after week (b) you walk around the university and you see people putting your layouts up as a poster.
There are some out there that can do both but I find it to be very rare (and thus should be highly paid). I have worked with some very artistic people in the past who couldn't code to save their life. I always tell them "you make it look good and I will make it work."
Something not mentioned, people who are desingineers often gravitate to a comfort zone with regards to money and ability. Let's face it, design is subject to the whims of opinion and can take a really, really long time, code on the other hand usually just works or doesn't.
Dealing with clients on design projects compared to code is like night and day.
And be wary of people who say they are great coders and designers. In most cases, it's more half designer and half engineer; meaning you'll have an ugly design and a messy code.
I recently made the jump from doing freelance web development work with most of my clients coming from craigslist to being the Director of User Experience at a software startup developing algorithmic trading software and doing UI/UX consulting for another company.
Right now I am working in C#/WPF for one company and Sencha (ExtJS) for the other.
Sorry if I came off that way. I am confident in my abilities to create awesome interfaces but I still have a lot to learn and a lot of time/practice to put in. My original comment was meant to be from the viewpoint of a "desingineer".
I know the article is probably referring to someone who is equally talented in development as they are design, able to create the backend along with the frontend, but I feel that being able to implement my designs in Windows Presentation Foundation, ExtJS, JQueryUI, Wordpress, etc make me a desingineer as well.
I think the mistake is in structuring the company so that people have to be awesome on both axes. Either that, or so they're forbidden to become good at both.
Every developer is a designer. (You can't make something without thinking about it at least a little.) Every designer can be a developer if they want. Both skills take plenty of practice.
Nobody is likely to be 100% amazing at both, but that doesn't matter: a lot of day-to-day work is pretty mundane, so nobody has to be amazing all the time. As long as you have somebody great that you collaborate with frequently, you can still get a great product, and everybody gets to up their game over time.
Skill-based division of labor is fine for assembly-line products, but for iterative, creative work (which is what all startups are), I think you need intense collaboration, which requires broad skills. That's why IDEO, a design powerhouse, looks for what they call t-shaped people: http://chiefexecutive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-...
It's a cheesy name, but I think the idea's spot on.
I recently applied at a YC funded startup. Their job description had the most random combination of front-end/back-end technologies that exactly matched my recent focuses, and said absolutely nothing about design. I considered myself extremely qualified.
I received a call the following day and was told I was a top candidate. As the interviews progressed with each founder (3 of them), I started to get the impression that they also wanted a designer. I was super careful about managing their expectations and let them know I wouldn't count on my design skills for anything more than "not ugly".
I didn't get an offer.
This is the second time in my very remote, limited experience I've speculated a startup hiring stereotype that has later been echoed in the community. I've convinced myself that both indicate the lack of experience that startup founders have in hiring. Yet another reason I suspect founders can't find talent. After all, what kind of established, motivated and passionate, developer/designer would want to bet their livelihood on a startup that doesn't pay well, isn't clear about its expectations, and shows signs of inexperience?
Sounds like you dodged a bullet. The founders probably weren't going to give their first employee the kind of equity they were going to give themselves, despite the fact that their first employee would have to be more qualified than they were.
I have about 14 years into my career as a web guy who can code (front to back), design killer UI and create, execute and grow business strategy.
What that being set! "being" a generalist is not for everyone.
There are some things to note:
1. Keeping up with all three is a LOT of work. Understanding the latest javascript libraries, deployment tech, UI tools and successful business models take a ton of time. I roughly spend 15-30 hrs a week trying new things our, designing or running spreadsheets not to mention the meetups and whatnot.
2. Every startup is looking for this person because they can enable so many parts of the success equation in one, self-contained shot. They add more value per square inch at critical phases of business growth that is a considerable asset. As a startup grows, this is personality turns into an optimal product lead, who can drive major decisions and participate in meaningful discussions with teams, investors and press.
3. Large corporations are not tuned to need or understand your services, unless you are accomplished in mid- to senior-level management positions.
4. You can visualize and eval business ideas quickly, then be able to communicate them to specialists with ease. I can't tell you the number of times being able to verbalized the need for a linked list or onHover whatever has made communcation easier with people who I bring to help me execute. This makes you a better implementer who is respected by counterparts and team members. Business folk quickly grasp CLV and burn margins when deciding to invest or advise.
4. You don't necessarily become an expert in everything. In fact, it's near impossible. I've had to focus of two or three major activities and fine tune my skills. This could mean I will be specializing in the future.
5. You don't get rest. The world is moving quickly, technology even faster. There are millions of able and hungry people willing to execute on their great ideas every single day. That means I have to keep moving or lose my flow. I can probably point to 7 or so ideas that were launched in the time I was evaluating the opportunity with 3 that have gone onto real growth.
I'm 21 years into my career myself, so the web is younger than my carrer. At this point, I do full stack development as well.
And... I think you are taking on more than you need to for the discussion at hand.
If you are an excellent JS programmer, you don't need to keep up on the latest libraries. You can code what you need yourself. Sure, maybe you do something from scratch that could have been done with a newer library, but the 10 hours you lose there is more than made up by not having to do those 15 hours a week keeping up.
Likewise on your other tech points. Constantly churning your toolkit doesn't speed you up. It slows you down. There is a balance to be found where you keep up "enough", but still focus the majority of your time on delivering work.
I choose to spend a day or so each month trying to keep up, then roll with what I know for a while.
Likewise with some of your other activities. Meetups and business models? They may help you be a consultant, but that is adding yet a 4th role to the topic at hand.
Many of your other points also apply more to a consultant than a heads-down designer/coder.
In general, it sounds like you are trying to be an even rarer breed. More power to ya, but it may be overkill for most people.
The design's not bad and avoids most developer designed pitfalls, but it's not great either. HTML wise you've resorted to nested divs, there's errant elements floating in the wrong place and there's also a bunch of commented out code in each html page, which imho is always a massive red flag for me programmer wise. You shouldn't have to comment out code if you're using a VCS.
Obviously this is from 2 years ago, do you have any examples that better show off your skills now?
I'm not trying to pick on you here, it's more that I am honestly interested to see some of your work.
Matt, neither my code nor design will ever match someone who specializes in these areas. So I feel you're kind of missing the point. I never claimed to be a great anything so I wouldn't go jumping to conclusions. I simply do a little of everything. Kudos to your HN detective skills, Cookbuk was a weekend project hacked together playing with CI. Full blast reviews of missing or nested DIVs are a waste of your time that could be better spent on your startup. If you're looking for UI help on your corp or other products (which could use a refresher), lets chat.
You did say you had killer UI skills. Checking someone's comments and profile takes like 10 seconds.
I pretty much check the source HTML of every startup or demo site I see on HN as a matter of professional advancement and to see what they're using. People sometimes put easter eggs in their HTML or headers too, so it's fun too! Or even better when they're not minifying their JS and leave stupid comments in.
You'd be surprised about how much someone's HTML can tell you about them.
Don't see a problem with becoming a generalizing specialist that sees the whole picture from many facets - from marketing, business, coding, design (product, pixel...).
A startup needs people being willing to fill these roles and if a said venture is successful (and becomes a business), you can afford specialists, until then, I would expect people to have many roles.
I think I must fit into some super set of this somewhere.
My day job is as a physical product design engineer for a consultancy and have a degree in Industrial Design. So I would do the mechanical and aesthetic design of a product including Injection Moulding, Sheet metal, machining ect. which is not to dissimilar to someone doing the user interface and back-end of the software/web product.
What makes me a little different is that I spend my evenings doing web development and although I have never done it "professionally" I think I am probably allot better than most at the front end development using html, css and javascript (I do like a dash of coffee script). I also have a fair bit of experience with Python on the back end mostly using Django but have also more recently been experimenting with Gevent and web-sockets to do some interesting live updating stuff.
So I suppose I'm a bit of an odd ball, I can't work out how to get both the physical product design and all my interest in web development (front and back end) into one job. I think I will just have to invent a job for myself that does...
i'm a designer/engineer and trust me there isn't anything mythical or special about it.
i've been a web/graphics designer for 9-10 years and coder for 3.5 (python at first, but this year i started ruby/rails)
from personal experience i can say almost all creative/visual people are scared of logical/geekish computer stuff ... i was scared and lost at first too but then i realized i'm quite good at architecture and once i put my focus on becoming a better at it things weren't scary any more. my designs improved, my love of internet expanded and i can't imagine doing anything else!
the most important mistake designer make is that they think they need to become REAL "software engineers" like building compilers or even worse thinking they have to master java or C++! (nothing against java, it's just that designer shouldn't start with java or similar programming languages)
for all you designers first learn html5, css3, a bit of javascript and then start with python/ruby (django/rails) and go from there. it's not a 1 night journey, it will take couple of years but it's worth it!
I would think that the type of person that is a designgineer is likely to be informally trained, usually starting as a design person and becoming increasingly more technical over time.
Because of this, I reckon they would do poorly at a lot of the types of technical interviews that are in fashion today, such as puzzle interviews and data structure/algorithm questions that you'd probably only do well with if you had a computer science background.
"Tell me how you would go about building an efficient maze generator" is the wrong kind of question for these people. "How would you go about building token-field interface from scratch in javascript" would be a better question.
Sites like InterviewStreet and CodeSprint don't optimize for hiring this kind of person.
I think you are right, I suspect that is a drive to invent things and a passion for technology, that is at least how it works for me:
web design as a kid + DT at school + always inventing things -> Industrial Design at uni -> interest in developing product from both the user facing side and technology behind it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadHonestly, this reinforces the issue that startups do a poor job of recruiting outside of their 20 mile radius. For example, its early in the office, and I still see 5 people who have pushed high level applications, good front ends, and the occasional mobile app.
Simple! Pay 'em less & give 'em equity!
Also, if you're in the situation where you have to hire generalists instead of specialists, you are likely a small business, rather than a high growth startup. If you have a war chest and are looking to scale, it's a mistake not to hire specialists -- you as the business owner should be able to tie everything together, not an employee.
Defining an engineer is easy: can build systems that optimize for function. Can build a UI that the user can understand to the point that the user can gain value.
How do you quantify design? How do you quantify a designer? If we had metrics, then it would be easier to understand which freelancers actually are "Desingineers."
(Is this how German got started?)
this line of thought just stems from the conflation of graphic design and interface design. the skill in demand is the latter. to be good at it one needs to be able to be proficient in html, css, javascript, and have basic abilities in whatever server-side technologies are in use.
so, yes, these folks will be hard to find. just like any other good engineer, they'll either have a job, be kicking ass, or doing their own thing. c'est la vie. try offering a wage they can't refuse.
I really don't follow. A kick-ass interface designer can know nothing more than Photoshop. A front-end guru can be terrible at interface design. There's very little connection between interface design and the technologies used to implement it.
The best designers will know HTML+CSS+Javascript pretty intimately for a variety of reasons.
Can you name a few? I work with an absolutely brilliant designer who can't write a lick of HTML/JS/CSS however he intimately understands how his designs will translate to a browser.
For starters, whatever you design in Photoshop typically looks 10-30% different in the browser when converted to HTML. That is significant enough to make the concept look very different than the actual browser interface implementation.
An interface designer who only operates in Photoshop thus cannot deliver accurate-looking concepts.
HTML isn't the culprit here. Any design done in a static medium is going to change when actually implemented on a device, for a platform. But it could just as easily be Flash as HTML. Good designers understand and account for the target medium (flexible sizes, variable fonts etc).
Also I reject your initial hypothesis. With a knowledgeable designer's design I can get a pixel perfect HTML implementation. If your design changes 30% just in the implementation then your designer doesn't understand the medium very well.
contrast that to being able to rapidly iterate on the real code.
i don't mean iterate as in "code a feature, commit to the repo, send for review, do over". i mean the tweaking while coding.
Good interface designers should definitely know the basics of the technologies used to implement their creations, in the same way industrial designers are expected to have some understanding of materials and manufacturing processes. It's often said that designers thrive on constraints: a designer does his best work when he knows the limitations of his tools, and works with their limitations and defects to create something useful instead of pursuing some impossible level of perfection. Designers, too, have to ship, and they ship best when they know what's behind the facade.
The engineering mindset and the UX design mindset optimize for different things. Even if you are excellent at both, it helps to have someone else forcing you to get the UX right when you're doing the engineering work, and to make the engineering possible when doing the design work.
The people who can do both at the same time don't differ in having both skills -- lots of people have them -- but in having the discipline to optimize for both in alternation.
I think more important is just to get out of the engineering mindset and try to think like a user. I bet just sitting down with a non-technical person and working through the UI design would help a lot to keep me from going into my engineering mindset.
As in any profession there will always be some extraordinary individuals that are heads and toes above the rest.
I don't think that the skill set required is actually that different, but your right in saying discipline is required in order to excel in both.
Then I think the key point is those that do possess both skills and the discipline/drive to excel at both are usually either doing very well doing their own thing and aren't looking for work.
And yes, it often takes longer to code features than it does to draw and place their UI elements.
For almost all situations I think you are better off getting two developers with complementing skills rather than two jack-of-all-trades that can do "everything". If you can only afford one person then seriously consider how to contract out some tricky parts of the weaker skills to an expert. Then you have a good foundation to build on.
For me it's less of a discipline issue and more of a time issue.
Both the backend and the frontend take a lot of quality time to do them right. It's simply not effective to have a single person context-switch between them, even when said person is very good at both. I.e. this is one of the situations where two people can indeed produce a given result nearly twice as fast.
However, I also agree that on top of that discipline plays a role, too.
While wearing the engineer-hat you have to constantly force yourself to stick with the brain-damaged abstractions that comprise todays "state-of-the-art" and not give in to the urge of fixing them bottom-up.
I.e. when both front- and backend are in your hands then the temptation to make the frontend truly model-driven can quickly become overwhelming (auto-generate those stupid forms and validations! why mirror when we could just rpc!). Sadly more often than not this results in a huge time-sink, as you embark in an uphill battle against a tool-chain that's strongly optimized for the exact opposite.
I believe strongly in the value that knowing both can give you, and for certain classes of small project it's a huge win.
But you're right: context-switching is a limiter. You only have so much free time and mental energy.
For me, I know that I prefer working with competent UX/visual design guidance. I can get some really pretty results from doing my own designs, but it's a wonderful freedom to know that I'll spend 15 minutes in the morning iterating on a piece of paper with a designer today, and then just go away and do my thing. I'll get a PSD that will make the prototype UI more concrete late-afternoon, and the next morning we can talk about how using the UI makes us want to change it.
But if I was doing it all myself? I doubt that even with twice the time, the overall result would be equal, either on the code or the design side.
That designer keeps all of his visual design acumen and photoshop 'muscle memory' loaded into cache.
I keep my emacs key-chords, the code's secret sauce, my bash and git aliases and the topography of staging environments loaded into my cache.
There are definitely projects that exist where you can 'do it all', but ... node.js' model is great for maximizing throughput, but when you've got drastically different types of work, that's what you have multiple cores for. ;)
More than just the same work 2x, but more like 3x or 4x because of holding it ALL in your head and trying to balance it.
I had the same experiences you did. So, while I'm a good back-end developer, and a great front-end developer, I've chosen to focus on design because A) I'm amazing at it -- it's my best skill, so that is the best use of my energy, B) I don't have the time or energy to do it all any more.
That said, I do still pay attention to the overall shape of the code (and my husband/biz partner pays attention to the design).
Several times, I've been able to wade into a drawn-out discussion between my biz partner and one of our freelancers, & cut thru the crap with a beautifully architected solution. Which always makes me feel warm & fuzzy. And they look at me and go "Oh yeah, you DO know what you're doing," which is worth it just for that. (Because my biz partner has this irritating tendency to tell me "that's impossible" as if he forgot that I damn well know it isn't ;)
Being entirely wrapped up in the code OR the design can be dangerous. ("That's impossible!" - ha.)
I wouldn't trade my ability to do both for anything. I'm glad my husband & I are both "desingineers," at slightly different mix percentages.
The problem is, he ignores deadlines because he hates the brain dead abstractions and bad code, and decides to unilaterally refactor.
I feel sorry for him because I understand that he can't stand the sloppy code, he is working with nimrods and mediocre people (and awful tools), what he should do is quit. (some of the mediocre code is, I admit, mine, I've stopped caring and I just want to build a nest egg to quit)
Unless I'm working for myself I find I rarely have this freedom. This is why I left my last startup. If I'm trying to do both there are too many things that I'm accountable for on a daily basis to the boss, who in my experience doesn't want me to stop coding to "waste a day" designing.
And in the end I feel like I just end up doing a half-assed job on both. More power to those who can do the switcheroo, be excellent in both, and keep the writer-of-paychecks happy!
"Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"
When the organization structure of a project is 'there's just one guy who does it all', the software architecture will tend towards 'the big ball of code' pattern.
However, if the team on a project has people who are engineers, and people who are designers, then a designineer might be a useful product manager to help balance conflicting engineering and UX requirements.
In a startup, looking for a first hire engineer, you probably want someone who will grow into that role - but it's a mistake to have your first system built by them and them alone, because you'll almost inevitably wind up with a big ball of code.
In general, all software should be built by at least two people collaborating, to force some division of responsibility, which will (via Conway's Law) force some structure.
(as you say, the best developers are disciplined and capable of structuring systems in the absence of a forcing structure. This is maybe because they divide work logically into units, and therefore find themselves collaborating with their past- and future-self, giving the structural effect of team work. But apply pressure to even a great developer and that discipline can break down.)
If we accept the initial premise that designers who are also engineers are as rare as ninja-unicorns, then surely the logical thing to do is to turn them into managers?
When you design a UI as an engineer, you're thinking long term. Like make the whole thing white so that new features can be added in easily. Also, the logo is going to need to look good on white anyway for email footers, Facebook apps, etc..., so just make header background white. Then you may have integrations with third-party widgets. All will support white best.
Also, things that 'look' good often are not usable. Like text below 11px, and low contrast shades of text may not be visible to older folks. I see this stuff all the time on sites with 'awesome' design.
Also, images for backgrounds, corners, buttons etc... slow the page load down and don't allow for easy extensibility or iterating. So if I can't do it with CSS, I don't do it.
Page load time, non-buginess, and iteration leading to smooth functionality are the most important parts of UX, IMO. Making the site look like a piece of art does none of these, but I think art gets confused with UX too often. Do you visit this site for the beautiful design? How about Google or Facebook?
If you spend the time to do beautiful design and functionality like Apple, you can create something where the beauty does not detract from usability. But, that takes somewhere on the order of 10x the resources since they're doing 10 prototype designs, refining 3 of them, and only keeping one. If you're trying to create a market, then that makes sense. However, if you're trying to create the most useful product in an existing market, then you're wasting time IMO.
I also know a few guys I've worked with that are very strong in the same areas. It's more pleasurable to work with a team where every member will do well in all areas, even if we have a core area that we would prefer to be an expert in. I don't believe those people are mythical or hard to find.
The myth is that startups want those people, but don't have enough money to afford them. They want desingineers that are cheap. I'm personally tired of seeing "stock options" in startups that don't have a product yet.
This is how the company I work for right now does it and it is EXTREMELY inefficient. I've been advocating them to go back to one person to do html/css/js/php.
I can see the above work for large orgs. But with a 3-4 person tech team, super specialization has not worked at all
Designer starts on the project a week ahead of programmer. Gathers requirements (with the programmer tagging along). Does paper sketches which get a general a-ok from everyone.
Does html prototype, ideally already in rails.
Hands off to developer, developer wires up. Over time they iterate together on the same codebase.
Your designer seems to do both (1) and (2) which is more manageable and something I've had work well. Likewise, your programmer seems to do both (3) and (4).
The problems arise when you need to tweak a small feature. You end up needing four-five people(if you count product manager) to touch it to make the change happen. It's not efficient at least for a web start-up(I can see it work for larger enterprises).
That does sound pretty nuts - seems like almost every layout/front-end/design change you'd ever need to make would touch both HTML and CSS, requiring two people to handle it separately.
It works really well. We also continuously try to expand to the others territory.
IME, you need certain attitudes towards life to get good at both.
You need to be a visionary AND an engineer. Usually people are one or the other and prefer it because they suck less at it. Hence, they eventually get great at it. But this means the other suffers. To be in the designer+engineer category, you first need to figure out what you are good at (essentially what you spend a large chunk of your time on - dreaming or coding) and then what you are weak at.
Then practice doing the weak thing for a couple of years.
Pretty soon, you are a designeer.
Problem is, in the startup world, I still can't figure out WHY you should be both when you can hire people to complement your weakness. Steve Jobs was obviously only a visionary and he, through practice, became great at it. Dennis Ritchie, an engineer.
Unless, of course, startup is not your endgame. Unless your goal is self-improvement powered by a zesty thirst for knowledge. In my limited knowledge, though Learnado Da Vinci fell into the designeer category, he was still very much an idea person (visionary) than an engineer - mainly because he procrastinated like crazy with his projects (for years, at times). This shows that he preferred conceptualizing the project and loved cultivating the vision rather than actually implement it.
Thoughts? Please give me some feedback, this stuff is important.
Anyway, I think I can say without exaggeration that I'm better than average in both engineering and design. At least for me, I think you have to be born that way -- you get pleasure both from aesthetics, and from solving problems. And when left alone by a world that sees both as separate, you just do your thing.
I started got a computer when I was 11. Other people played games. It seemed completely natural to me to spend almost all my time programming pretty graphics demos.
But how do you get any better? I think you have to be the kind of person who seeks challenges, who seeks a ladder to climb.
For computing, I think we all know that drill. Open source has made it so that you can start anywhere and go all the way to OS development, if that's what you want. You can also get work (even if you have little experience) and use other people's resources to educate yourself.
For design, it's a bit harder. Perhaps I was lucky in that I continually wavered between science and engineering, and design and journalism.
In my teens and early 20s, I was the production/layout guy at student newspapers. So I could educate myself, with thousands of dollars of other people's money, in a way that was almost ridiculously unsupervised. That sharpened my appreciation for typography, photography, design, etc., as well as gave me some experience managing people, budgets and deadlines. But I guess that other people in that role might not have gone as crazy as I did for the design aspect. Especially for the entertainment sections (where design was allowed to be more fun) I was trying to top myself with every single issue that I did. You know that you're doing it right when (a) the bloody thing actually makes printing deadline, week after week (b) you walk around the university and you see people putting your layouts up as a poster.
Dealing with clients on design projects compared to code is like night and day.
I know what you mean and it is easy to pick issues, just wanted to state these differences.
I possess: Taste, attention to detail and aesthetics, an understanding of human factors as they relate to computer interaction.
What does that make me? :)
Right now I am working in C#/WPF for one company and Sencha (ExtJS) for the other.
I know the article is probably referring to someone who is equally talented in development as they are design, able to create the backend along with the frontend, but I feel that being able to implement my designs in Windows Presentation Foundation, ExtJS, JQueryUI, Wordpress, etc make me a desingineer as well.
Every developer is a designer. (You can't make something without thinking about it at least a little.) Every designer can be a developer if they want. Both skills take plenty of practice.
Nobody is likely to be 100% amazing at both, but that doesn't matter: a lot of day-to-day work is pretty mundane, so nobody has to be amazing all the time. As long as you have somebody great that you collaborate with frequently, you can still get a great product, and everybody gets to up their game over time.
Skill-based division of labor is fine for assembly-line products, but for iterative, creative work (which is what all startups are), I think you need intense collaboration, which requires broad skills. That's why IDEO, a design powerhouse, looks for what they call t-shaped people: http://chiefexecutive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-...
It's a cheesy name, but I think the idea's spot on.
I received a call the following day and was told I was a top candidate. As the interviews progressed with each founder (3 of them), I started to get the impression that they also wanted a designer. I was super careful about managing their expectations and let them know I wouldn't count on my design skills for anything more than "not ugly".
I didn't get an offer.
This is the second time in my very remote, limited experience I've speculated a startup hiring stereotype that has later been echoed in the community. I've convinced myself that both indicate the lack of experience that startup founders have in hiring. Yet another reason I suspect founders can't find talent. After all, what kind of established, motivated and passionate, developer/designer would want to bet their livelihood on a startup that doesn't pay well, isn't clear about its expectations, and shows signs of inexperience?
What that being set! "being" a generalist is not for everyone.
There are some things to note:
1. Keeping up with all three is a LOT of work. Understanding the latest javascript libraries, deployment tech, UI tools and successful business models take a ton of time. I roughly spend 15-30 hrs a week trying new things our, designing or running spreadsheets not to mention the meetups and whatnot.
2. Every startup is looking for this person because they can enable so many parts of the success equation in one, self-contained shot. They add more value per square inch at critical phases of business growth that is a considerable asset. As a startup grows, this is personality turns into an optimal product lead, who can drive major decisions and participate in meaningful discussions with teams, investors and press.
3. Large corporations are not tuned to need or understand your services, unless you are accomplished in mid- to senior-level management positions.
4. You can visualize and eval business ideas quickly, then be able to communicate them to specialists with ease. I can't tell you the number of times being able to verbalized the need for a linked list or onHover whatever has made communcation easier with people who I bring to help me execute. This makes you a better implementer who is respected by counterparts and team members. Business folk quickly grasp CLV and burn margins when deciding to invest or advise.
4. You don't necessarily become an expert in everything. In fact, it's near impossible. I've had to focus of two or three major activities and fine tune my skills. This could mean I will be specializing in the future.
5. You don't get rest. The world is moving quickly, technology even faster. There are millions of able and hungry people willing to execute on their great ideas every single day. That means I have to keep moving or lose my flow. I can probably point to 7 or so ideas that were launched in the time I was evaluating the opportunity with 3 that have gone onto real growth.
And... I think you are taking on more than you need to for the discussion at hand.
If you are an excellent JS programmer, you don't need to keep up on the latest libraries. You can code what you need yourself. Sure, maybe you do something from scratch that could have been done with a newer library, but the 10 hours you lose there is more than made up by not having to do those 15 hours a week keeping up.
Likewise on your other tech points. Constantly churning your toolkit doesn't speed you up. It slows you down. There is a balance to be found where you keep up "enough", but still focus the majority of your time on delivering work.
I choose to spend a day or so each month trying to keep up, then roll with what I know for a while.
Likewise with some of your other activities. Meetups and business models? They may help you be a consultant, but that is adding yet a 4th role to the topic at hand.
Many of your other points also apply more to a consultant than a heads-down designer/coder.
In general, it sounds like you are trying to be an even rarer breed. More power to ya, but it may be overkill for most people.
As the only link I can find to your work that you've shared so far is this http://cookbuk.com/ (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2289991)
The design's not bad and avoids most developer designed pitfalls, but it's not great either. HTML wise you've resorted to nested divs, there's errant elements floating in the wrong place and there's also a bunch of commented out code in each html page, which imho is always a massive red flag for me programmer wise. You shouldn't have to comment out code if you're using a VCS.
Obviously this is from 2 years ago, do you have any examples that better show off your skills now?
I'm not trying to pick on you here, it's more that I am honestly interested to see some of your work.
I pretty much check the source HTML of every startup or demo site I see on HN as a matter of professional advancement and to see what they're using. People sometimes put easter eggs in their HTML or headers too, so it's fun too! Or even better when they're not minifying their JS and leave stupid comments in.
You'd be surprised about how much someone's HTML can tell you about them.
My day job is as a physical product design engineer for a consultancy and have a degree in Industrial Design. So I would do the mechanical and aesthetic design of a product including Injection Moulding, Sheet metal, machining ect. which is not to dissimilar to someone doing the user interface and back-end of the software/web product.
What makes me a little different is that I spend my evenings doing web development and although I have never done it "professionally" I think I am probably allot better than most at the front end development using html, css and javascript (I do like a dash of coffee script). I also have a fair bit of experience with Python on the back end mostly using Django but have also more recently been experimenting with Gevent and web-sockets to do some interesting live updating stuff.
So I suppose I'm a bit of an odd ball, I can't work out how to get both the physical product design and all my interest in web development (front and back end) into one job. I think I will just have to invent a job for myself that does...
EDIT: I guess I'm a web-mech-prod-desingineer...
i've been a web/graphics designer for 9-10 years and coder for 3.5 (python at first, but this year i started ruby/rails)
from personal experience i can say almost all creative/visual people are scared of logical/geekish computer stuff ... i was scared and lost at first too but then i realized i'm quite good at architecture and once i put my focus on becoming a better at it things weren't scary any more. my designs improved, my love of internet expanded and i can't imagine doing anything else!
the most important mistake designer make is that they think they need to become REAL "software engineers" like building compilers or even worse thinking they have to master java or C++! (nothing against java, it's just that designer shouldn't start with java or similar programming languages)
for all you designers first learn html5, css3, a bit of javascript and then start with python/ruby (django/rails) and go from there. it's not a 1 night journey, it will take couple of years but it's worth it!
Because of this, I reckon they would do poorly at a lot of the types of technical interviews that are in fashion today, such as puzzle interviews and data structure/algorithm questions that you'd probably only do well with if you had a computer science background.
"Tell me how you would go about building an efficient maze generator" is the wrong kind of question for these people. "How would you go about building token-field interface from scratch in javascript" would be a better question.
Sites like InterviewStreet and CodeSprint don't optimize for hiring this kind of person.
web design as a kid + DT at school + always inventing things -> Industrial Design at uni -> interest in developing product from both the user facing side and technology behind it.