A place to try things

My portfolio has always been full of regulated work I cannot show. That was never going to change. Those seem to be the problems I like to solve.

So I wanted this site to be something else: a place to try ideas, big and small, and see what holds.

I have worked alongside developers, directed developers, and dabbled in development for my whole career. My strength was always the direction. The code I left to people who were better at it. To test an idea on my own I would have needed skills I do not have, or a developer with a lot of free time and the patience to let me beat up an idea for hours, with nothing to show at the end but me saying I do not know what this is for yet, but I promise there is something here.

AI is that developer. This fall I treated my own site as the experiment. What could I make with it as a coding partner and a brainstormer? And what would it teach me about how I communicate?

What it taught me

It reinforced how I already work, and how the best teams I have been on work. Planning and discovery are where you find out what matters to your stakeholders. You hear what they say they want. Sometimes you find what they do not yet know how to say. That takes structure.

The same was true here. The time I spent on the brief, and on prompts written with intent, saved a lot of back and forth. And it got me to what matters most: something real to react to. A stakeholder with a working version in front of them will tell you more than one asked to imagine it from a readout.

It also gave me room to work out how I work with it. Some of my ideas arrive half baked. Some of my instructions are vague. I built patterns for that. I switch between models: one to refine a plan, one for a quick answer, one to take a swing at a problem while I sleep or when I have hit a wall.

None of this is far from directing people. Say what matters. Decide. Give them something real to react to.

What I tried and dropped

My brief asked for something engaging. I wanted the site to say that my portfolio and my career should feel like a playground, anchored in work that means something to me.

So I tried things. A fluid field of pixels. A canvas every visitor shared. The two combined. One where you flung pixels at the navigation to open a page. All of them worked. I dropped them all. Each one felt like a demonstration of a technique, and I wanted the homepage to feel like me.

That is discovery doing its job. I could only tell what was wrong once I had something real to react to.

I get excited about new things. I love stories. I get invested quickly, probably too quickly and too deeply. But that forces me to focus, and to pull out the parts that matter.

What is here

The homepage is a sandbox. The pixels in the wordmark move, and you can draw with them. If you make something you like, send it to the wall. There is work, some of it protected because it belongs to clients. Ask and I will open it up. And there are experiments, where the smaller things go.

What comes next

This site is a place for the work, the experiments, the passion projects, and probably some failures too. A lot of what I am trying is not here yet, only because I have not found the hook. It will change over time. It should, and so should my work, with every new thing I dive into.