If you’re a designer in the market for a job right now, you probably feel behind the AI wave already, and you’re wondering if the skills you’ve honed in your career are even useful anymore. One of the benefits of being an oldster in this field is that you begin to see patterns in everything, and I’m here to tell you that this pattern has happened many times before and there is a clear way through it as a designer.
In 1995, halfway through college, I determined I was going to be a designer. At that time, 99.99% of “professional designers” had no experience designing anything for the internet. You could have tasked some of the most accomplished designers at the time — Jony Ive, Paula Scher, David Carson, Paul Rand, Massimo Vignelli — with creating a simple 468×60 banner ad and none of them would even know what you were talking about.
Over the next five years, the world would discover what banner ads and the internet were, but most experienced designers stayed put in print, television, or whatever field they were already comfortable with. The designers who would go on to help shape the internet were from two groups:
People brand new to the industry
People who looked forward to starting over and getting good at something new
I was somewhere between the two groups, having spent a few years in print but leaning more into a childhood love for new technology than anything else.
Within a few years, the demand for internet-native designers exploded and created the thriving job market we have enjoyed almost uninterrupted until now. Analog design still produces some of the most amazing creative work on the planet, but the growth of that part of the profession has not been the same.
Running design at Microsoft AI and having done a decent amount of hiring lately, I can tell you that the patterns emerging now are exactly as they were in 1995. There is a giant population of designers who have a bunch of really great skills. Some of those designers will decide they are content doing the same sort of design they have done for their whole careers. Others will decide to learn as much as they can about AI and prepare for an industry that will look very different in 5 to 10 years. Finally, there is another group of people who have no design experience whatsoever but are so enamored with this new technology that they will teach themselves very useful skills in a short amount of time. Do not underestimate this third group as it’s easier than ever to fake it ’til you make it right now.
If you are content in your comfort zone, that’s perfectly fine. If, however, you are looking to lean into what’s next, here are some suggestions.
I grew up on Iliff Street, right in the middle of the ashes that up until a few nights ago, was a sunkissed neighborhood known as Pacific Palisades.
It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he would wet the house down, top-to-bottom, and everything surrounding it. I don’t remember everybody doing this, but my Dad is a Meteorologist, and back then he worked at the SCAQMD, the regional agency charged with studying, regulating, and improving air quality in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Because of his specific remit and where we lived, he had a deep understanding of the Santa Ana winds and their effect on the Palisades.
When my dad explained what he was doing, he would point northeast to the hills behind us and tell us that if the winds didn’t die down, the fire miles in the distance would come towards our tiny little house and there would be trouble. As a small child, I don’t actually remember being scared about any of this. Every year there was a fire, the smoke was always so far away and so barely visible that it just seemed like anything else in life at the time. And besides, dads are superheroes to their children, so of course there was no danger.
The Mandeville Canyon Fire in 1978, taken by my dad from our roof
We ended up living in the Palisades until I was 15, when we moved up to Seattle, but in that time, these sorts of fires happened almost every year to some degree. The 1978 one was a big one though, and my dad had a flight scheduled to New York the following morning. He woke up every hour during the night to check the wind readings, and loaded up our Impala wagon for a prompt evacuation. That is how precarious things were, even 47 years ago. By sheer luck that night, the winds subsided, and the Palisades were spared. A few more hours of wind and 1978 would have been 2025. Same damage. Completely flattened.
I guess Pacific Palisades has always been a wealthy area, but wealth back then seemed less of a step-function than it is now. The “alphabet streets” where we lived seemed like the most modest of the neighborhoods; the place where teachers, government workers, and clerks lived. My parents bought our 1200 square-foot rambler for $38,000, and pretty much no one in the neighborhood had views of anything. The neighborhood was so named because the streets went from Albright, to Bashford, to Carey, to Drummond, to Embury, to Fiske, to Galloway, to Hartzell, to Iliff, to Kagawa. Felt really great not having to even look that up just now, but I will admit that I was Today Years Old before realizing there is no J. I wonder why. Each street was basically the same, although I distinctly remember Galloway having more tree trunks pushing the sidewalks up, making it a better route for jumping your Mongoose bike or Powell-Peralta board.
Art Davidson: Meteorologist, and professional piggybacker
As a kid growing up in the ’80s, the Palisades had everything you could possibly want. It was a “free-range” neighborhood, where we could ride our bikes as far away as the Santa Monica pier without worry. Palisades Park was home to AYSO soccer, tennis, basketball, “Par Course” stations, and most importantly to me, little league baseball. I was part of the “orange” franchise which started you off as a Ranger, then a Twin, and finally an Oriole. Our patron saint was Mel Haggai, who up until now, I didn’t know had flown 30 missions over Germany as a gunner when he was growing up (!!!). Mel got me to switch from first base to catcher, where I could have more impact on games. We didn’t have a single left-handed catcher’s mitt in the entire league, so he bought me one with his own money. I also remember perennial umpire John Meyers, who took me, my friend Adam Segel, and a few others to Disneyland, only to have to deal with us getting thrown out of the park for jumping off of a few of the rides and causing havoc.
Since reflecting on one year at Microsoft almost 12 months ago, a lot has changed. Most visibly to the outside world, we’ve completely re-designed and re-engineered our Copilot consumer app from the ground up with a a craft- and quality-first mentality.
The New Copilot mobile appCopilot Daily helps you catch up with world eventsGenerating images is easier than ever
Every element moves more gracefully, every response loads much faster, and every detail is more considered. Copilot may be the tip of the spear when it comes to how we are thinking about our products over the next decade, but we’ve also begun to modernize Edge, Bing, and our news offerings. We are just getting started.
Here is a preview of a feature we are working on for Edge that allows you to co-browse the internet with your AI companion. It’s the most powerful addition to the web browser since video:
Copilot Vision in Edge
We aren’t just adding to Edge, but we are also — just as importantly — subtracting from it. Although Edge has grown browser share consistently for several years now, we’ve also grown our feature set a little too aggressively. Every so often, you have to step back from the bonsai tree, look at it from all sides, and prune. The Edge of tomorrow will be both simpler and more powerful than it is today.
Same deal over on Bing. We are pruning away old growth to make room for better-looking, more powerful search results:
A world with cleaner search results
There is a lot more going on in Microsoft AI as well, including a bunch of new things we are cooking up for MSN:
A new butterfly for a new chapter of MSN
If you’re interested in joining the Microsoft AI team, we have a number of positions open right now that I’ve listed at the bottom of this post. If we already know each other, please reach out directly.
I mentioned in my last post a year ago how there were a lot of processes we needed to improve in the coming months. I detailed an unbroken chain of 8 steps for great products to emerge:
An idea that can improve lives if executed well.
Foundational research to light the path before design and coding begin.
Rich design explorations and prototyping to make the experience palpable.
Buy-in to build it at a level of quality that makes the team proud.
Impeccable UX engineering and UX writing to make sure every detail is dialed.
Well-conceived server-side engineering to make it scalable and maintainable.
Creative marketing to prime people for the experience.
… and finally, maybe more important that anything else on this list, the will to keep refining relentlessly after the experience is launched. This part is so often neglected as companies rush to build more things.
Although we are still in the first inning of this journey, I’m happy with the progress we’ve made across the board… in particular, steps 4 and 8. There is a different energy when everyone who is working on the product knows the standard is not “good”, not “better than our competitors”, but “the best version imaginable”. We are not there yet with any of our products, but there is no confusion where the bar is.
Reorienting our cross-functional teams to prioritize user experience has been a gratifying (and ongoing!) challenge. The vast majority of companies are not set up this way for a variety of reasons, some good, and some bad. In some industries, surviving might mostly about cost minimization, and not user experience. In other industries, “good enough” might be all people expect or need. But in just about all companies, there is some form of diminishing returns when it comes to how much time is spent getting every detail just right. The question is: where does a company draw the line?
One sign your company draws the line too low is if people insist that every detail, no matter how esthetic, be rigorously tested in order to prove it is instantly metrics-positive. This is a sign of a culture that rejects the value of taste and long-term vision.
Does that mean you should test nothing? Of course not. You should test everything, at the very least, to prevent accidentally messing something up. I still remember more than 20 years ago, during my first week at ESPN, causing our entire front page to disappear because I forgot a semicolon in a Javascript file. Testing for safety and information, though, is different than testing as religion. Furthermore, there are some things — particularly in the world of large language model training — that should absolutely follow a cycle of train/test/release/repeat.
Culturally speaking, this rebalancing of our values has created a spark for great work to emerge. Many of the same people who have been working on Bing, Edge, MSN, and Copilot for years simply have a new set of product-building principles now, in addition to some great new teammates and refreshingly smaller, evenly staffed cross-functional teams. It’s been wonderful seeing everyone exercise muscles that show up more often in startups and creative agencies than in 49-year old tech companies. The ingredients have been here all along, but the recipe is changing.
Speaking of ingredients, we are looking for more Designers and User Researchers to join the team at Microsoft AI.
These positions are United States only, Redmond-preferred, but we’ll also consider the Bay Area and other locations:
Note that we are looking mainly for experienced, hands-on individual contributors to join our team. If inventing the design patterns for the next phase of the consumer internet sounds right up your alley, we’d love to talk to you.
I tried some absolutely outstanding ice cream yesterday that reminded me of yet another reason I feel lucky to be part of Generation X:
We are living in the golden age of ice cream.
In the 1970s, we had a few basic flavors to choose from: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, and rocky road. There were a few shops like Baskin Robbins that marketed some scary stuff like Rum Raisin, but if you were just getting ice cream at the supermarket or some other ordinary location, those were your choices.
There also wasn’t as much science to ice cream back then. The term mouthfeel was still relatively obscure. It all seemed perfectly good back then because… ICE CREAM!!! … but compared to what we have today, it was, as the kids say, “supes basic”. In the 1980s, along came the frozen yogurt craze which pointed to how much untouched frontier was ahead of us. Shoutout to Humphrey Yogart, by the way — the world’s best named frozen dessert shop. Shoutout also to Aaron Cohen’s Gracie’s, which not only has excellent ice cream, but the world’s only bathroom dedicated to Dolly Parton.
Anyway, we’ve learned so much about fat content, texture, and flavor combinations since then that we have practically invented a new food group.
A few years ago, during a trip to the underrated gelato mecca that is Croatia, I had a variety which tasted different than anything I’d ever tried. It was a “fig yogurt gelato” from a little shop in Cavtat. I usually stay away from frozen yogurt because it’s generally not as good as ice cream, but this was intriguing. A great flavor (fig), combined with a beautiful tartness (yogurt), along with best texture for frozen desserts (gelato). It was outstanding, and I have not been able to find anything like it ever since…
Until yesterday!
Behold, Hellenika Cultured Gelato:
I don’t think I will ever purchase another brand of ice cream at the store ever again. It is the most perfect ice cream I have ever tasted. The creamiest mouthfeel, wonderful flavor combinations, and that little bit of tang which reminds you this is no ordinary substance.
Hellenika is a small creamery run by three Greek/Australian siblings with a single location in Pike Place Market in Seattle. Until recently, it was not available in stores, but you can now pick up pints in Metropolitan Market.
If you live in Seattle, you need to try this immediately.
If you don’t, you should try to get someone to mule you some in dry ice. Hopefully one day it will ship on Goldbelly.
Don’t get me wrong. I like a good low-grade Blue Bunny mini-cone as much as the next person, but I feel like we’ve passed through some sort of intergalactic hyperspace with this gelato. The future is now. Get this to your freezer any way you can. 🙌
The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.
I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine around 2016 about this, and he artfully explained this theory to me at the time. It was an aha moment for me, as I tend to view each new decade as "the best one" because of how the world has advanced over my lifetime. Your view on this appears to depend quite a bit on the degree to which the news you read enriches or poisons your psyche, but also the happiness and agency you feel over your own life as you've grown from a child into an adult. For some, this arrow points up, for others, it points down, but I bet the biggest increase in the last decade or so is those for whom the arrow points up but feels like it points down. Outrage and fear-fueled information platforms are partially to blame, but so is the very American culture of determining your own happiness by comparing yourself to your neighbors or peers.
I had the good fortune to attend the excellent Pearl Jam concert at Climate Pledge Arena last week, and it reminded me of something I already knew: I liked music in the 1990s more because I had the excitable mind of a teenager, and being 30 feet away from them brought me back to the very best of those times... but you couldn't pay me enough to go back in time to any decade.
"Here’s where the science gets really ugly. The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia — the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure."
A spot-on analysis of where we are as a society with our addiction to short-form entertainment and distractions. I really only see one way out of this (for me, at least) that is simple and resolute: ditching the smartphone. I have tried this for periods of time and it's been perfectly fine in my personal life, but once you need to carry a smartphone for work, complete elimination becomes tricky. I've moved back to my iPhone Mini, which helps a bit, but the thing that would really do the trick would be a phone that only did messaging, phone calls, calendar, Teams/Slack, and maybe Maps. I honestly don't even need a camera, though I'd understand that addition.
Last week marked one year at Microsoft for me, and what an unexpected adventure it’s been! I thought I was coming in to lead a a stable of popular, but well-trodden web properties, and I ended up getting to work on a whole lot more, including Windows, Bing Chat, and the company’s biggest bet in years: Copilot.
“The Handshake” — Designed with Love, in Puget Sound
I usually write a lot about the companies I work at but have held off until now because we haven’t been hiring. Well now we are! We’re specifically looking for Designers and UX Engineers to work on our design system for Copilot. Some of these positions are on my team and based where we have offices (Puget Sound, the Bay Area, Atlanta, New York, Vancouver, Barcelona, Hyderabad, Beijing, and Suzhou) and some are on adjacent teams and can accommodate fully remote work. If you are a Designer or UX Engineer with a passion for design systems and AI, we’d love to chat.
A recent visit to our team in Beijing… I had never been!
So what has year one been like? The good and the “needs improvement”. 🙂 👇
One of the reasons I decided to join Microsoft was I missed the joy of in-person product-making. I know not everyone feels the same way so I’m not trying to make any broad statements about local vs. remote work, but for me, it has been even more refreshing than I expected. I usually come in 3-4 days a week, while others on the team are anywhere from 0 to 5.
It’s funny, sometimes I will wake up on a Monday and think to myself “ahhhh, this is going to be a chill work-from-home day” and by the end of the day, I realize I’ve been staring into a screen on video calls for almost the entire day and how much that slowly saps my energy. Meanwhile, in-person days are filled with walks, whiteboarding, and energizing sessions with some of my favorite teammates I’ve ever had. I realize not everyone feels this way about being in the office from time-to-time, but I do. Even our fierce, interdepartmental karaoke battle helped bring a bunch of teams together who had never met before.
Mojin killin’ it at design karaoke
The other great thing about lucking out and joining when I did is that we are embarking on one of the rare paradigm shifts that occurs in technology maybe once a decade. The 1980s were about personal computers. The 1990s were about the internet. The 2000s were about smartphones. The 2010s were about the cloud. And the 2020s will be about AI. The really powerful thing about all of these developments is that they don’t replace each other, but rather they build on each other. AI is the result of everything that came before it. If you got into design to help shape the culture of the world around you, these are the moments you treasure.
These turning points are also wonderful because they give you a chance to reawaken to your Beginner’s Mind. I have learned more in my first year here than at almost any other time in my career. Not only does the pace of technological change in AI force you to build skills as you go, but there are so many amazing engineers, designers, researchers, writers, marketers and other creative people to learn from, that it happens almost automatically.
When I was interviewing here, not even my prospective new boss told me about any of what was behind the curtain. Only during my first week did I find out all we are working on to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. That is Microsoft’s mission statement, if you hadn’t heard it before. It’s an uncommonly good filter with which we can all ask ourselves every day “does this project actually do that?” It’s quite freeing as it gives you license to question projects at every stage of development.
Don’t sleep on these pillows
Another thing I’ve loved about my first year here is that I joined a group that has figured out how to ship very quickly. That also has its downsides, as we have plenty of craft problems to solve, but it’s great working for one of the largest and most established companies in tech and being able to ship within weeks of designing something.
One more thing that’s blown me away is the Inclusive Tech Lab, where we work on new technologies to make our products inclusive to people all of abilities and walks of life. No one experiences technology the same way, and teammates like Dave Dame and Bryce Johnson do a ton of great work to make sure that’s top of mind for everyone.
Finally, one of the unsung benefits of working for a native Seattle company again is that Seahawks stuff is all over the place. Presentations, charity auctions, everyday office attire… you name it. It’s nice to not be the only one with good taste in football teams.
There are actual seahawks on campus
I am no corporate shill, however, so I must also be honest about some of the things that need improvement over here.
At the top of my list is that Microsoft has not yet fully embraced the role design plays at most other tech companies. We were engineering-driven in 1975 and we are squarely engineering-driven in 2023. The world, meanwhile, has changed in that time. It is no longer sufficient for complex things to work. They must also shed their complexity. People expect the products and services they spend their time and money on to delight. To overdeliver. To give them superpowers. Those sorts of qualities only materialize when you have supergroups building products.
In music, a supergroup is when a singer, a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, a keyboardist (and so on) who are all at the top of their game come together to create an album. In tech, a supergroup is a researcher, a couple of designers, a product manager, and a Volkswagen Bus or two full of engineers. Up until a decade or so ago, a lot of tech companies followed the model of packing projects with as many smart engineers as they could find and only sprinkled in things like design and research as necessary. I still see some of this thinking in pockets over here. I’m trying to influence things, but it’s a delicate dance, especially when the company has had such enormous success by doing so many other things very well.
I think there are plenty of people here who still feel like being engineering-led is unequivocally good, but to those people I would say that in a modern tech company, design is engineering. It’s no better or worse, but it does have very different leverage in the building of a product.
Mess up the green or the yellow, and all the blue work can be wasted
On the plus side, Microsoft has never had as much design and research talent as it has right now, and we are increasingly looked to by the executive leadership team as lighters of the path. When we go into high-stakes meetings, we always go in with pixels and prototypes, which are uniquely good at cutting through bullshit and ambiguity. As a wise person once said, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.
There are a ton of amazing designers and researchers who have been here for 10 and even 20+ years whose hard work has led to this moment of evolution for the company, and every day I am in awe of their perseverance.
Temple of the Dog: Seattle’s greatest supergroup
Next on my list is how often we get in our own way with “procedural goo”. I’ve worked in plenty of large companies including Twitter, Disney, and MSNBC, and have never seen the level of approvals, paperwork, and rules that get in the way of speed and autonomy here. Just transferring someone from within my own org to a slightly different role within my own org took a dizzying amount of effort. At most companies, this would have been about 10 minutes of work: one minute from me and nine from someone in HR trying to navigate to the right screen in Workday.
Then we have acronyms. My GOD do we have acronyms. I actually liked acronyms before I got here! I usually think they are cute. After seeing a new one almost every single day since getting here, I have resolved to never use them either inside or outside of work. I even say “Cyan Magenta Yellow Black” out loud if I have to!
When I think of bad acronyms, I always remember cf2gs: an excellent, but unfortunately named ad agency from Seattle’s past
Finally, the last thing on my list — and this is where you come in — is dedication to craft. It is so tempting to try and “science” your way into viable products these days. Build the beginnings of a customer base through rudimentary product-market fit, and then fastidiously optimize your funnel, your game mechanics, your viral loops, your push notifications, and so on and so forth. These gains are not always easy to come by, but they are rooted in ruthless experimentation and allegiance to short-term data. Our north star is at least pretty pure — Daily Active Users — and that metric is usually a good indicator that you’ve made something people like, but doctrinaire allegiance to almost any singular metric can quickly make people forget why we are in this profession to begin with: to improve lives. Or to put it squarely in Microsoft parlance again: to help every person and organization on the planet achieve more.
If you ever find yourself asking the question “how can we increase Daily Active Users?” instead of “how can we make our product better for people?”, you’ve already lost. Metrics are trailing indicators of qualitative improvements or degradations you’ve made for your customers… they are not the point of the work.
Recently, we’ve made some excellent strides in prioritizing qualitative product improvements even when they fly in the face of metrics we care about, and it’s really gratifying to see. It reminds everyone that a product is the collision of thousands of details, and the crafting of these details requires taste.
The Polaroid SX-70 camera: a triumph of design, engineering, and dedication to craft.
Designers are often looked to as “owners of craft and taste”, but craft is very much a team sport. It’s not just how things look and feel but also how they work. I very much like how Nick Jones (channeling Patrick Collison) at Stripe put it in this video:
Foundational research to light the path before design and coding begin.
Rich design explorations and prototyping to make the experience palpable.
Buy-in to build it at a level of quality that makes the team proud.
Impeccable UX engineering and UX writing to make sure every detail is dialed.
Well-conceived server-side engineering to make it scalable and maintainable.
Creative marketing to prime people for the experience.
… and finally, maybe more important that anything else on this list, the will to keep refining relentlessly after the experience is launched. This part is so often neglected as companies rush to build more things.
Some people would look at this list and think “yep, makes sense”. Others would look at it and think “sounds slow and not very agile”. The trick to balancing this level of quality with speed of development is realizing that it’s often more efficient to experiment in step 3 than it is in step 6. This is why so many modern tech companies realize that hiring more designers and researchers doesn’t waste time and money… it saves time and money. With less than a week of one designer’s time, we can produce a wide variety of prototypes to test with real people. Just recently, we created an entire GPT-powered research application without even bothering a single engineer.
Design is engineering.
Finally, a brief note about prototyping. I would argue that the most impactful innovation in the craft of product development over the last 20 years has been the rise of rapid design prototyping. Prototypes that demonstrate an experience are useful not just in usability testing, but also in selling ideas up and across the organization. Engineers hate working on things that haven’t been thought through or “appropriately politicked” yet, and if you can bring them a working prototype that has already been vetted with users and various stakeholders across the company, they will love you for it and work hand-in-hand with you to get every detail right.
Design prototypes are the currency of a high-craft, high-speed product development organization, and they are increasingly the currency of our team.
Alright, back to the hiring. I plan to hire against the entire growing list of products our team is responsible for: Copilot, Windows, Edge, Bing, Start, Skype, SwiftKey, and so much more… but for now, this is a concerted hiring effort centered around Designers and UX Engineers to help build out the emerging design system for Copilot and our suite of AI-powered products.
If this is you, please have a look at the following roles we’ve just posted:
It’s been awhile since I’ve written a post on Mike Industries, so I thought I would resume programming with an unorthodox product suggestion that I am pretty sure you will love: snail mucin.
I recently got back from a trip to Korea where this stuff was all over the place. I had heard about people rubbing snail slime on their faces before but never really gave it much thought since I have quite literally never found any sort of face cream/lotion/serum that seemed any better than anything else. They are usually either too greasy or they evaporate too quickly. I’ve had pretty splotchy, combination skin my whole life, and oddly the only thing that has ever helped me is the sun. Come fall and winter, when sun is harder to come by in Seattle, things usually deteriorate pretty rapidly.
On a whim, I decided to buy three snail-based products: this cleanser, this serum, and this cream. Total cost: $45. (These are not affiliate links.)
It’s been almost two months now, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I haven’t had a single dry patch, blemish, or even a hint of redness since the very first application. Just a dollop of serum in the morning, a regular face wash with the cleanser at night, and a spot of cream right after. Whole thing takes a only a minute.
Other than the results, the best thing about this stuff is the way it feels. It’s just a super thin layer that stays on all day and you don’t even notice it.
Anyway, skin care is way off of my normal beat, but I figure if you’re looking for something new yourself or want to give an amazing gift this holiday season, you owe it to yourself to try this stuff! It really does work.
Despite living in Seattle for almost all of my adult life, I haven’t actually worked for a local company in almost ten years. Remote work is great in so many ways, but in-person collaboration is what gives me life.
In confident pursuit of that feeling, I’m thrilled to be joining Microsoft to run Design & Research for their Web Experiences organization.
I was Microsoft-adjacent 10 years ago at MSNBC.com in Building 25, but this will be my first time as a blue badge, so to speak. I’m also thrilled to be joining Liz Danzico and John Maeda, who have also started at Microsoft in the last several months. I’ve known them both for a long time and have wanted to work with them forever.
There are several things which drew me to this opportunity, but at the top of the list is the people. Not just Liz and John, but the thousands of teammates in Seattle, Vancouver, Hyderabad, Barcelona, Beijing, and many other cities. There are certainly some great solo efforts in tech, but almost all of the best work I’ve been around has been the result of getting the right people jammin’ with each other. In my first several days here, I’ve already met so many of those people, and I can’t wait to continue the momentum Albert Shum created by carrying the torch for one of the best Design & Research teams in the Pacific Northwest.
The second thing I’m super excited about is the scale of the work. I’ve worked on the largest sports site in the world and one of the largest social networks in the world, but the properties in this group reach well over a billion people. Between the (refreshingly fast!) Edge browser, MSN, Bing, and several other products, Microsoft has quietly built up one of the top five properties in the world in terms of traffic and reach. They’ve also done it with humility, knowing how far they are from being perfect. I also love that so many of these products can and will be so much more as we begin to use some of the technology that’s emerging within Microsoft. In my first two weeks, I’m already overflowing with ideas.
Finally, the other thing I’m most excited about is getting back into the office in a flexible hybrid environment. I’ve worked in-person for most of my career and remotely for the last four years, and where I’ve landed is that everyone’s preferences are different, and it’s just tradeoffs all the way down. Where you land depends on a mix of your personality, your life outside of work, and what type of job you have. For me personally, I very much like being around people and feel like I do better work when I am… but I also like getting back my commute time a couple of days a week and making daily jogging more convenient. Also, Henry (pictured above) enjoys the extra lap time. Microsoft’s hybrid policy is a nice balance, and it sounds like exactly the right setup for someone like me.
Speaking of the exactly right, this also feels — for me at least — like exactly the right time to join Microsoft. The company has been through several distinct eras over the decades, but this feels like the era of re-commitment to the planet. To customers delightful experiences, to employees a great environment, and to the natural world, a smaller and eventually negative carbon footprint.
It’s a new year, and I couldn’t be any more here for it!
Over the last several weeks, I’ve gotten in the habit of trying to move all of my Twitter activity over to Mastodon instead. I signed up for Mastodon several years ago, but only now are there enough people using it for it to replace a lot of what you might use Twitter for. Some of your friends are there, some of your favorite bots are there, and some news sources are there. What more do you need in life, really?
I’ve been using Pinafore (along with a user stylesheet I created… feel free to grab it for yourself) to use Mastodon on the web, and a combination of Ivory and Metatext on my iPhone. Ivory looks a bit nicer but Metatext has a Notifications tab that acts more you’re used to it working on Twitter.
If you want to move all of your activity over wholesale, go to town. If, however, you want to keep publishing Tweets on Twitter and have them automatically publish to your Mastodon account as well, this short guide is for you. The entire process should take around five minutes. It’s mostly just clicking around on a couple of websites.
Important: If you do this, the goal should not be just replicate your Tweets and never visit or engage on Mastodon. The goal should be to help you build your Mastodon presence and save you from having to manually double-post. Ideally you quickly get to the point where Mastodon becomes your primary crib.
Step 1: Open a Mastodon account
If you’ve already done this, great. If you haven’t, head to any server you want — like mastodon.social, for instance — and set up your account. You can always switch your server (along with any followers you accrue) later, so don’t stress about the server you choose.
