About

What I do

I fix messes. My favorite mess is an information one, where nobody can tell whether campaigns are making money because you can’t see them across systems, or you can’t build the cool stuff designers are coming up with because your content is just 65 million untagged markdown files. (These are both real problems I’ve fixed.) Sometimes, the mess is a people one, instead (or a people one dressed up like a technical one), like the rendering modernization that had been languishing for three years, making various engineering managers mad enough to quit, that I got finished successfully in six months, by listening to the people who knew what they were doing and working the political angle for them.

I know how information works, and I’m a realist about the organizations it works in. I like working with people to figure out what the best information architecture they can ship is, and making it happen.

I currently work at Factor, helping clients fix their messes. I also teach undergrad and graduate classes at the University of Washington, to try to train my replacements.

Why I do this

I joke sometimes that I do this work because I moved twenty four times before I went to college and went to nine schools. That’s a lot of figuring out the rules in different places if you’re not going to eat lunch alone. Some of that time was in Italy, where learning a new language and culture put that training into overdrive.¹ ⊕ ¹ I’m not fluent, but I try to keep my hand in. Right now I’m listening to Mariuoli, a podcast about the massive 1990s bribery scandal. My adult life is much more boring, so I have to get my kicks by figuring out messes professionally. If you have a problem that no one wants to think about, I’ll probably love it.

What I don’t do

I’m not a fonts and colors designer. I don’t do a lot of brand-new greenfield work. I don’t maintain things that are already going well (though I know great people who do both these things beautifully.)