While building an application is always fun, I really love the process of designing it. Not visually, mind you. I make no claims at being good at visual design. But its structural design… What problem(s) are we trying to solve? What are the core events and user flows that the application is attempting to concern itself with? What are the best tools and abstractions to handle these events and flows? How do they all fit together?

This is catnip to me.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I only enjoy so-called “greenfield” projects. I also appreciate the challenge of learning a mature application and bring the same lens to how it might be improved.

I’ve had the joy and pleasure to design and build initial prototypes of applications that solved early-stage getting-to-market problems, and growing them to mature tools allowing the business to scale to a company with hundreds of employees. I’ve also had many opportunities to work with applications which were mature, but struggling and needed refactors. Analyzing how all the pieces fit together and perform, weighing the original intent vs current needs, whether the improvement can be made with a small slice or a major chunk of work is tons of fun.