other people's fingerprints

personal websites can make it look like one person sat down and had every idea. that's not what happened here

some parts came from people i worked beside. others came from websites i kept returning to, where an idea or tiny detail stayed with me long enough to shape what i made next. i like to think carrying those things forward can be a small kind of homage, as long as i remember to point back. so this is me doing that while i still remember where some of it started

i worked with Max Barvian at Clerk for a while. he is one of the best developers i know, (though you would never hear that from him). working with him was a pleasure, and i always enjoyed reviewing his PRs and seeing how he thought through a problem. i just like how he builds things. his website became one of the references for mine

NumberFlow is everywhere here. it is a pretty good example of what i mean: it looks great, feels great, and replaced the sketchy counter i had written myself, so everyone won

Mery Kaftar and i also worked together at Clerk. i was always surprised by where she could take an idea. she helped me with some early page and animation prototypes, gave me the kind of feedback that made them feel right, and taught me a lot while we were at it. she was also so kind through all of it. working with her was just great

her website includes me in its collaborations section. i still smile when i find my name there, mostly because it takes me back to the things we got to make together

not everything came from people i knew. i haven't met Rauno Freiberg yet, but his website has been a reference since before i started this one. it has changed a lot since then. the old pull-to-expand image interaction is gone, but i still use the idea for images here

his Craft pages, especially Designing Depth, showed me how much better a long post could feel when it stopped obeying one narrow column. the table of contents on the left, the wide images, and the pieces spilling outside the text became references for my own blog

the layouts were only part of it. the attention he gives to every detail is kind of ridiculous. Designing Depth goes so far into why tiny choices work, and Invisible Details of Interaction Design uses screen recordings and little prototypes to do the same for interactions most of us barely notice. his posts are some of the most pleasurable things to read on the internet. they are a treat. i tried to bring some of that joy here too. now the rest is on me whenever i write something new

Benji Taylor is another person i only know through what he made. his website has been in my reference pile for a while: hand-drawn marks next to crisp type and small hits of color, loose without getting messy. i kept that in mind while laying out posts here

then he released Drawesome, and i looked at it and went: yep, that's the guestbook. i had wanted a place where people could leave something more personal than text for a long while, but knew it would be work, so i kept avoiding it

i met Flo Guo while i was staying in San Francisco for a few weeks in early 2026. i was captivated pretty quickly by her personality and the way she talks about the things she cares about. when we talked about work, i could see the sparks in her eyes. she is one of the most talented designers i know, and her website shows why: it has all these separate panels, each holding a different idea, but the whole thing still feels simple and pleasant

i especially loved reading through her bookshelf. her notes gave me a small glimpse into what another person noticed and chose to keep from each book. there was something about reading someone else's notes around a book that reminded me of S., where the handwritten notes in the margins tell a whole other story. it felt a little like living through that again, and pushed me to make my own shelf

she also puts favicons beside external links, a tiny detail i liked enough to bring here. now they're in Codex and half the internet, so i have no idea who is copying who anymore

reading Pawlean changed what i wanted a personal website to be. Pauline, one of my best friends, made it. it shows how good she is at what she does without starting to sound like a portfolio. it shows how much people appreciate what she does without making her sound full of herself. it shows how much she cares about people without having to tell you that she does. there is still room for the places she has lived, her friends, her journal, and the community around her

you can move from her work to her story, and disappear into the vault, but it never feels like pages assembled to look impressive. it feels like her

reading it made me want to be more honest here and less interested in making myself look impressive. she is one of the reasons i keep writing even when i publish almost none of it (the publishing part is my fault, not hers). if this site feels a little more like a person than a résumé, i owe a lot of that to her

i could call all of this a list of references, but that feels colder than it is. some of these people changed how i build. some gave me the push to make things i kept avoiding. some made me want to put more of myself here

so yes, this is my personal website. like me, it carries little pieces of a lot of other people