I work at the intersection of user experience, design, and code. Passionately curious, never bored.
I work at the intersection of user experience, design, and code. Passionately curious, never bored.
Six research artifacts, built with a team of five researchers, mapping what AI means for developer roles, the DevOps loop, and GitLab’s product strategy over the next several years. Context & Contributions GitLab’s design team was sprinting on a bold…
A live repository of 200+ GitLab research reports, with a research agent, a hypothesis validator, and semantic links out to customer quotes, support tickets, and sales calls. Context & Contributions GitLab produces a lot of research. By the time I…
A meta-study to make three years of research understandable, important, and actionable Context & Contributions The main focus for this project was Autodesk’s cloud platform (Forge) and better understanding the body of research that had been done on the experience…
Mapping the onboarding customer journey for GitLab Duo, from first awareness through ongoing feature use, to find out why onboarding was so painful and what to do about it. Context & Contributions We already knew from prior research that onboarding…
A competitive and market analysis of the fast-emerging AI code review space, with strategic recommendations for where GitLab could move next. Done in Q1FY27, so by the time you read this it’s undoubtedly out of date — but it wasn’t…
Mapping the real, systems-level work developers do with GitLab, from first day onboarding all the way through deploying features. Context & Contributions GitLab is a single application that spans the whole DevSecOps lifecycle: Plan, Create, Verify, Package, Secure, Deploy, Monitor,…
Releasing a toolkit for agile integration of research and design insights Context & Contributions This project was born out of the realization that our organization’s agile practice was not lining up with our research and design philosophy. We wanted to…
A simple flowchart as an exercise in understanding Early in my time as a UX Researcher at Autodesk, there were only two of us on the team (there are 10 at the moment I’m writing this), and we needed ways…
Laying a robust groundwork for platform analytics across an entire organization Context & Contributions Autodesk’s Cloud Platform (Forge) has several applications and services. Understanding how our customers work, how they use the applications or features is accomplished by using analytics…
Defining the UX research process for Autodesk’s Cloud Platform group Context & Contributions I was the second member of a two-person research team when I joined Autodesk’s cloud platform group. Part of our charter was to build out the practice…
Project Soli is a radar sensor platform enabling gestural interaction with embedded devices. I worked on the team for about 18 months as a UX researcher and prototyper. My personal responsibilities on the team ranged from user research of core…
The SparkFun Inventor’s Kit for Photon is an introductory Internet-of-Things experiment kit, with a Particle Photon compatible microcontroller, breadboard, and a variety of sensors. Along with other members of SparkFun’s IoT taskforce, we designed the kit, the BOM, the experiments,…
As part of a taskforce investigating how SparkFun could support the Internet-of-Things, our group designed and released six add-on shields for the Particle (formerly Spark) Photon board. Of the six, I was personally responsible for the three pictured and described…
Over the past few months, I’ve been lucky enough to be invited by Kylie Peppler to participate in a couple of webcasts for the state department (the Bureau of International Information Programs at the U.S. Department of State, to be…
So, SparkFun has these awesome 32×32 RGB LED panels. They also have a cheap webcam and a powerful-enough microcontrollers (a Teensy 3.1 in this case) to potentially drive live video from a webcam onto this RGB LED array. I set…
At the FabLearn conference in Fall of 2014 I presented a paper called PopCad: Towards Paper-Based Fabrication Tools for Children, which illustrated some of the doctoral work I did on tangible modeling interfaces for 3D printing. You can watch the presentation here –…
A while back (like a LONG while back), I was on an episode of SparkFun Live (along with Dave Stillman) discussing self-balancing robots and doing a brief teardown of the MIP – a cute little self-balancing robot that’s somewhat hackable.…
I was lucky enough to get my panel picked for SXSWEdu 2015, which happened this past March (yes, it’s taken me this long to update my website). The panel was called “Game Changers: Tools for Constructivist Learning“, and featured three…
About two years ago, Nate (SparkFun’s CEO) asked me if I thought it would be possible to interface the IOIO board with Processing. The IOIO is a great microcontroller that allow really easy ways to talk to hardware through an…
In the second version of the PopCAD, we replaced the copper tape with conductive fabric tape, which can be laser cut. We carefully etched out a circuit on paper, cutting through the tape and not the paper underneath to make…
PopCAD (version 1) is a paper-based 3D-input device for beginner-level 3D modeling. It connects to a piece of software to display different shapes in real-time based on the actions of the user turning on or off different lights. The lights…
Last Wednesday, April 9th, I successfully defended my dissertation, entitled “Embodied Fabrication: Body-Centric Devices for Novice Designers”. Yay! Which means I will be updating this website again now that I have a bit more free time on my hands. I’ve…
SparkFun (with myself as the circuit designer) recently teamed up with DIY.org, a web community that encourages kids to gain skills in all sort of areas – from astronomy to camping to hardware hacking – to bring a new skill to…
I’m unsure of where to begin. I have many memories of Red, from when I was a young child running around ITP back when it was half the size, the Polaroids were non-digitized, and there was an actual library on…
SnapCAD is an extension of the ideas that started with the UCube – a tangible interface to aid beginners in modeling and designing for 3D digital fabrication tools (like 3D printers). SnapCAD is essentially an interactive volumetric display – the…
I was invited to be part of a broadcast Google Plus hangout hosted by MAKERBridge on the subjects of physical computing and making. It’s a nice hour-long discussion with Julian Sefton-Green, Kylie Peppler, Dave Mee, Christian McKay, DK Arvind, and…
Here’s the link to the archived version of the panel discussion I participated in this morning (along with awesome people like Don Miller, Kylie Peppler, Syed Salahuddin, and Toni Pizza), covering how to engage kids in learning through DIY and…
I’ve been invited by the Institute of Play in NYC to be on a live-over-the-internet panel discussion of why DIY tinkering and physical computing is important for children: “Join Playtime Online Wednesday, March 6 from 12–1PM EST to learn about…
If, for some reason, you want to watch me talk for an hour, here’s a link to the lecture I gave at Georgia Tech as part of the Nokia Invited Lecture Series on Mobile and Future Technologies. And while I’m…
A while back (July 2012), the Craft Technology Lab, including myself, presented work at the Denver Art Museum as part of Untitled #49: Ideate, one in a series of events hosted by the museum. It was a blast getting to see…
My colleagues John Schimmel (of DIYAbility and NYU’s ITP), Jaymes Dec (of Marymount School, formerly of GreenFab), and I are putting on a workshop as part of the ACM SIGCHI Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC), which will be in…
After several years and many requests, I have finally put up the code for the Equipment Inventory System I wrote for Eyebeam back in 2007 or so. I cleaned it up a *little* – mostly to remove all identifying info…