More from Naz Hamid
Bridging the design-development gap as AI rises. There’s a frustrating gap in how development projects present themselves. What looks straightforward on GitHub — ‘just run this command!’ — quickly spirals into an odyssey of sudo permissions, package managers, and missing dependencies. As someone comfortable with design tools but less versed in development environments, I find myself mashing through terminal commands, hunting through Stack Overflow threads, and piecing together solutions without understanding the underlying context. What I’m missing isn’t the how, but the why. I get it: developers and engineers speak their language and rarely cater to non-developers. Robust beginner-friendly documentation isn’t what engineers want to be doing. Could these projects see greater adoption if they provided better context and more accessible instructions for newcomers or non-engineers? This includes guidance for people who’ve never worked with an API, or even know which directory they should be in to make package installs, let alone what packages are. The asymmetry between designer and developers is an interesting one. In my experience, designers build more of a bridge to developers because of wanting to communicate better with them. Designers start to code (sometimes as a forcing function) because they want to prototype and bring their designs to life quicker — no longer static and in turn opening their design and development possibilities. Developers might not return this in kind as they can build functional products without deep design knowledge or interfaces can be constructed using UI frameworks and libraries. Engineers are less pressured to become designers. They are paid more to specialize. Their bridge is to collaborate closely with design rather than to become a designer. Let’s talk about the new thing that is aiming to… supplant the above: AI. I can feed Claude or ChatGPT my entire codebase, give it files, have it sit inside my IDE, or even ask for code that does x, y, or z, and it’ll work with me to get these projects running. I’m comfortable with Claude, and it will give me cursory information on how and why. Of course, I don’t even know if the code is valid! And sometimes it’s not, but we work through it, and I come to a result that works. The knowledge transfer becomes even greater to non-existent. As I mentioned previously, vibecoding and generative codebases will likely increase as these LLMs serve solutions to ideas and concepts from the new generation of startups. Depth and understanding will be lost. When developers don’t understand the underlying principles of their code, debugging becomes a struggle; they can’t optimize for performance; and security flaws may abound. Technical debt will accrue in systems that become increasingly unknown and unpredictable. Broader innovation stutters because you’re stuck with what AI can give you. Homogeny ensues. For providers, the goal regarding LLM dependency, viewed from an investment perspective, is to mitigate or reduce cost and risk. In the end, entire software businesses are created around abstracting, simplifying, and making technology easier to use. What I lament is the focus on business opportunity, versus taking a more inclusive approach to bridging the gap between design and development or any other discipline with engineering. How do we get to better knowledge transfer? A tiered or tracked approach. One documentation track that exists for experts, and another that’s more verbose: context and explanation of the basics. Can open source projects and the like benefit from templates that encourage documenting the why along with the how? More collaboration is always good. I’ve benefitted hugely from working with engineering-centric product thinkers. I come at it from design with the knowledge of development, while my collaborators deal in code but find design a skillset to complement their coding skills. We meet in a middle ground that’s fruitful because we understand concepts. I am never shy about asking why something is done a certain way. And yes, AI. Can we use pattern recognition and matching to level up and progressively explain how and why things are built? There are many code-based helpers, but I’d love to look at how that a designer can utilize AI to pair program (something I do in trying to get to the why of it) — beyond working with an LLM. I’m imagining visual documentation or interactive tutorials that help guide you to various parts of a system. This knowledge gap has persisted for years, but AI is rapidly changing this landscape. While AI tools may bridge the divide between design and development by filling in missing context, I'm uncertain if this technological solution addresses the underlying communication problem — especially in an industry already stretched thin by time and resource constraints. This is an open dialogue for me at the moment, and I wanted to collect these thoughts at this time for later reflection. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
Memories are an interesting beast. I have certain core memories that are embedded deep in my mind. The years I attended SXSW from 2007-2012 encompass some of those. In 2011, I shared a house with longtime partner-in-crime Scott Robbin, Jeff Skinner, and Sam Felder. We were off South Congress up at the top of the hill and tucked away close to Curra's Grill on Oltorf. We were in a neighborhood where all the streets were named after Robin Hood characters: Friar Tuck Lane, Little John Lane, Sherwood Lane, Long Bow Lane, and Nottingham Lane. Because we had this house, we ended up hosting two separate nights of hangs and invited a bunch of people we knew. I made a video of it using the Panasonic Lumix GF-1, the much-lauded camera that my friend Craig Mod made famous. The video isn't much — but watching it back now, some 14 years later, I'm so very glad I put it together. Many of these people are still friends to this day[1]. Perhaps, one of the most poignant memories I have is shown at the end of the video — when just us housemates went bowling during some downtime, and I put Spoon's “The Way We Get By” in the video because on the drive back from the bowling alley, that song came on the radio. I'd never heard it before, but Jeff, Sam, and Scott all sang along to it, belting out the lyrics, windows down, as we're cruising south on I-35. We lost Sam years later. Sam was a great guy, and he is missed by many. I'm very, very glad I made that video, and that I can look back on it. And remember everyone there, but especially recollect, see, and hear Sam in it. RIP Sam. SXSW brought many things, and in particular memories of some of the best people on the internet I got to know, and became friends with. Thank you, all. In order of appearance: Jeff Skinner, Scott Robbin, Dave Rupert, Nathan Peretic, Reagan Ray, Jay Fannelli, Luke Dorny, Trent Walton, Scott Boms, Sam Felder, Patrick DiMichele, Christopher Cashdollar, Kevin Hoffman, Jack Auses, Rob Weychert, Jonathan Bowden, Phil Coffman, Noah Stokes, Harold Emsheimer, Paul Armstrong, Wilson Miner, Andrew Huff. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
The third culture difference. One of the hardest aspects of being a third culture kid and eventually adult is the difficulty in the journey of your identity. When you're young, the movement and culture- and context-switching are par for the course — it comes with the literal territory. As you get older, things happen: you transform into a chameleon and adaptation is one of your greatest assets. If you're me, you are seen as, sometimes advantageously, ethnically ambiguous. You somehow are part of the local fabric, depending on where you travel. And on the other hand, depending on where you reside over time, an assimilation or assimilations begin. It becomes part of your operating mode. As you get even older however, the mish-mash of identities and going with the flow start to untether any semblance of where you belong. Is it your birth country? Is it your citizenship? Is it the place you've lived the longest? Most are not like you. They may struggle with identity in completely valid and different ways. The third culture one is a big mash-up. I haven't completely met or known anyone quite like myself. Even a good friend who shared a similar path from college to the US, only overlaps with my experience to a point. My early years began elsewhere, which is a decisive difference. I have family, loved ones, and friends, but also my chosen or proximate family. They may not completely understand or ever understand, but I am thankful for their kinship, even if there's a part of me that will never feel completely whole. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
A meditation on entering flow state. A snack beckons. I stand up and head a few feet away to the kitchen area. A hojicha latte is on my mind, and also a bite. My brain is at operational capacity, and I am in a flow state. The metabolic need feels high, and I need to keep my energy up. I make the latte, iced with almond milk. I devour an oat bar. It’s the time of year when projects are in full swing. The seasons also drive business. Today started with syncing on UK time, getting on a call with Simon and then Jeff joining. We reviewed work and made plans. I know what’s immediately ahead of me today, and I steel myself mentally. It’s funny how the pressure from a timeline and deadline can focus you. Because I am a shokunin, I have my design mise en place laid out both in the mind, and at the physical desk. The plan appears, as I percolated on it after the call. I am now executing it. Windows are open all over: a browser with a tab count I can't even see, a few design tools, two deck tools, communication tools, and note tools. I stop to consider that I'm working across multiple variants of the same core pieces of software but in different flavors and with different purposes or are inputs from others collaborating. The mise en place is multi-modal. I am traversing them, wielding a strange authority over them all. After all afternoon and as the evening beckons, I share the file, toggling on collaboration. A message goes out to all parties. Flow state will come for us all. This is just the beginning. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
More in literature
In general, however, he [Louis XVI] preferred writing down his thoughts instead of uttering them by word of mouth; and he was fond of reading, for books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader. (Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette, 1932, p. 77 of the 1933 American edition, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul) Soon I will put up a schedule of my autumn Not Shakespeare reading, just in case anyone wants to join in. In effect it will be a lot of Christopher Marlowe with a few contemporaries. Marlowe is a lot of fun. FICTION Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team (1955), Jessamyn West – Reading Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) I wondered what else the New Yorker readers of the time were reading along with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” One answer is Jessamyn West. These stories seemed good to me. “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (1948) is easy to recommend as a sample, for one thing because it is only six pages. The Holy Innocents (1981), Miguel Delibes – A famous Spanish novel, just translated, that uses its post-Franco freedom to indulge in a little revenge on the powerful. Modernist and unconventionally punctuated, but I do not want to say it was too surprising. New to English – what took so long? That They May Face the Rising Sun (2003), John McGahern – I am not sure what a quiet novel is but this is likely one of those. Irish people lives their lives. Seasons pass. There is agriculture. I have not read McGahern before; my understanding is that the novels that made his names are not so quiet. But Ireland in 2003 had quieted down a lot, which I think is one of the ideas behind the novel. Quite good. The American version was for some reason given the accurate but dull title By the Lake. The Director (2023), Daniel Kehlmann – Discussed over here. NON-FICTION Brazilian Adventure (1933), Peter Fleming – A jolly, self-conscious romp written in, or let’s say approaching, the style of Evelyn Waugh. Young Fleming’s river trip in the Amazon is more dangerous and a bit more substantive than Waugh’s Mediterranean tourism in Labels (1930), but still, useless, except for the pleasures of the resulting book. Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (2003), Yoko Tawada – Tawada publishes fiction in both Japanese and German. This book is an extended essay about the creative relationship between the two languages, based on Tawada’s education, travel, and writing. It is perhaps especially fresh because English plays so little part in the book. How the Classics Made Shakespeare (2019), Jonathan Bate – Outstanding preparation for my upcoming reading. The title describes the book exactly. Marie Antoinette (1932), Stefan Zweig – Just the first 80 or 90 pages. I have wondered what Zweig’s biographies, still much read in France, were like, and now I know a little better. Not for me. Badly sourced and rhetorically dubious. Obtrusive! At times trying to hustle me! POETRY Selected Poems (1952-68), Vasko Popa Helen of Troy, 1993 (2025), Maria Zoccola – This Helen lives in Sparta, Tennessee. The up-to-date formal poems are interesting: American sonnets, and golden shovels, a form invented in 2010, incorporating lines from Robert Fagle’s Iliad. IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE La rage de l'expression (1952), Francis Ponge – More thing poems. Literatura Portuguesa (1971), Jorge de Sena – Long encyclopedia entries on Portuguese and Brazilian literature now published as a little book. So useful. A Bicicleta Que Tinha Bigodes (The Bicycle that Has a Moustache, 2011), Ondjaki – An Angolan boy wants to win a bicycle by borrowing a story from his famous fiction-writing uncle. Specifically by borrowing the letters that he combs from his moustache. That’s not how it works, kid. A Biblioteca: Uma segunda casa (The Library: A Second Home, 2024), Manuel Carvalho Coutinho – I have now read all the books I brought home from Portugal last year. This one is literally a series of four-page profiles of Portuguese municipal libraries. Why did I buy it (aside from loving libraries)? It is at times as dull as it sounds, but sometimes, caused by the authors skilled or desperate attempt to write a less dull book, shimmered with the possibility of another book, a Calvino-like book, Invisible Libraries. Visit the library full of obsolete technology, the library with books no one wants, the library for tourists, the library, most unlikely of all, where everyone goes to read books.
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-47), died at the age of thirty-one after a life spent mostly as a soldier, though he lived for some time in Paris and was befriended by Voltaire. His health was never good. No longer in the army, Vauvenargues died of complications from the frostbite he suffered during the War of the Austrian Succession. Not as well-known as fellow French moralist-aphorists La Bruyère, Chamfort and La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues’ thinking is informed by a soldier’s experience and is rooted in a pragmatic view of life: “It is not bringing hunger and misery to foreigners that is glorious in a hero’s eyes, but enduring them for his country’s sake; not inflicting death, but courting it.” The Reflections and Maxims of Vauvenargues (Oxford University Press, 1940) is translated from the French by F.G. Stevens. I’m using the copy borrowed from the Fondren Library. It is yet another volume previously owned by Edgar Odell Lovett, president of Rice University from 1908 to 1946. Again, one can hardly imagine an American university president today buying and reading such a book. In 1746, Vauvenargues anonymously published his only book, Introduction à la connaissance de l'esprit humain, which included Reflexions and Maximes. Here is a sampler: “People don't say much that is sensible when they are trying to be unusual.” “We condemn strongly the least offences of the unfortunate, and show little sympathy for their greatest troubles.” “There would be few happy people if others could determine our occupations and amusements.” “We should expect the best and the worst from mankind, as from the weather.” “Those whose only asset is cleverness never occupy the first rank in any walk of life.” “We have no right to make unhappy those whom we cannot make good.” “War is not so heavy a burden as slavery.” Vauvenargues is often gentler, less cynical than La Rochefoucauld. One tends to think of him as a boy. C.H. Sisson published an essay on him in the Winter 1987 issue of The American Scholar (collected in In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers, Carcanet Press, 1990) that begins: “Vauvenargues is hardly the most fashionable of writers. He has a further distinction, that there never was a time when his work was fashionable, yet for some two hundred and fifty years there has never been a time when he might not have been said to have friends and admirers.” Sisson places him among the “observers who lived in the world and recorded their findings in more or less summary fashion.” Sisson makes a useful comparison: “Vauvenargues is one of those writers, like George Herbert, whose life--and indeed death--cannot be satisfactorily separated from their works.” He adds: “A profound and vulnerable diffidence marks the thought of Vauvenargues as it marks his life,” and we recall how young and “unsuccessful” he was in life. Never married, no children, always fending off poverty. Sisson also wrote a forty-six-line poem titled “Vauvenargues” (Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1998), saying the aphorist “found no resting place on this earth.” He writes: “They say the boy did not learn much Latin But got drunk on Plutarch—perhaps Amyot? How many years of barracks after that, Inspecting guards, collecting up the drunks, Trailing his pike in the muddy streets, Garrisoned at Besançon, Arras, Reims? There were campaigns, though nothing much perhaps Historians would really care much about . . .”
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On Saturday I saw the first hummingbird of the season in our front garden. I’ve counted eight butterfly species there this summer and found a monarch chrysalis hanging from a tropical milkweed plant. Brown and green anoles have densely colonized the garden, which has never been so lush. Because of the ample lighting I usually read while seated on the couch by the oversized front window. The garden is a comfort. Framed by the window, it’s like a slow-motion movie. The appeal is less aesthetic than – what? Metaphysical? I like to be reminded of life’s profusion and persistence, the opposite of sterility. There’s little difference between “weed” and “flower.” I like Louise Bogan’s endorsement of weeds in “The Sudden Marigolds” (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005): “What was the matter with me, that daisies and buttercups made hardly any impression at all. . . . As a matter of fact, it was weeds that I felt closest to and happiest about; and there were more flowering weeds, in those days, than flowers in gardens. . . . Yes: weeds: jill-over-the-ground and tansy and the exquisite chicory (in the terrains vagues) and a few wild flowers: lady’s slipper and the arbutus my mother showed me how to find, under the snow, as far back as Norwich. Solomon’s seal and Indian pipe. Ferns. Apple blossoms.” A reminder that poets ought to know the names of wildflowers, according to Seamus Heaney. Not every poet would agree. I was looking for something in Zibaldone, Giacomo Leopardi’s 2,500-page commonplace book kept between 1817 and 1832, when I happened on a passage from April 1826 that only Leopardi could have written: “Go into a garden of plants, grass, flowers. No matter how lovely it seems. Even in the mildest season of the year. You will not be able to look anywhere and not find suffering. That whole family of vegetation is in a state of souf-france [suffering], each in its own way to some degree. Here a rose is attacked by the sun, which has given it life; it withers, languishes, wilts. There a lily is sucked cruelly by a bee, in its most sensitive, most life-giving parts.” Leopardi’s understanding of biology is limited but his Zeitgeist remains consistent. He goes on for a full page turning a mini-Eden into a raging Hell: “The spectacle of such abundance of life when you first go into this garden lifts your spirits. And that is why you think it is a joyful place. But in truth this life is wretched and unhappy, every garden is a vast hospital (a place much more deplorable than a cemetery), and if these beings feel, or rather, were to feel, surely not being would be better for them than being.” It's almost as though Leopardi had read the crackpot bestseller The Secret Life of Plants (1973) by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first encountered Leopardi more than half a century ago in Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1931). The Irishman refers to the Italian’s “wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire.” Beckett quotes two lines from “A se stesso” (“To himself”): “In noi di cari inganni, / Non che la speme, il desiderio e ’spento.” (“Not only our hope / but our desire for dear illusions is gone.” Trans. Jonathan Galassi, Canti, 2010). Melville, too, found a kindred spirit in Leopardi. In his 18,000-line Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), Part I, Section 14, “In the Glen,” he writes: “If Savonarola’s zeal devout But with the fagot’s flame died out; If Leopardi, stoned by Grief, A young St. Stephen of the Doubt Might merit well the martyr’s leaf.” [Zibaldone was edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, translated into English by seven translators, and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013.]
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