Earlier this year, in February, I launched a website called Craft & Systems. I moved some of my writing there and started publishing pieces about design leadership, building teams, and the work I was doing at my jobby job.
Writing helps me think. At the time, we were building the foundation for the design function, and writing gave me somewhere to work through that. As the team has matured, I’ve been able to step back a little. I’m still in a design leadership role, but writing about leadership hasn’t been what’s driving me creatively lately.
Somewhere along the way, more of my free time started going into making things. I’d been experimenting with AI coding tools, and they were getting good enough that I could take an idea much further than I’d been able to before. An interaction I wanted to try could become something running on my phone. Then I could use it, find out what felt wrong, and change it.
That became very absorbing.
Leading teams has put some distance between me and the details of making something. Building my own apps brings me back into those details, including the ones that only show up after you’ve lived with a decision for a while. An interaction that seemed clever becomes annoying. A component that worked in one place needs to work in six. Something looks finished until you try it with your own data.
It’s been useful for my work, too. Maintaining a design system across my own products gives me practical experience to bring back to our design system team. Working with tools like Claude Code also helps me contribute to the conversations our product designers are having as they explore new ways of working. It keeps a part of my design practice active that I’ve missed.
My first app was Vael, a journaling app. I spent about three months getting it ready for the App Store. That meant working through the whole product ecosystem, from onboarding and clean, intuitive settings to the website. I lost plenty of sleep designing the core experience, but I also worked through all the less exciting details needed to get it into someone else’s hands.
It was my first real experience with a modern development workflow since using CVS and Subversion some twenty years ago. I’m now comfortable with Git, GitHub issues, automated builds, and releases. At lunch one day, some developers at work introduced me to spec-driven development. Seeing how engineers use agentic coding tools was a major level-up for me. There was always something new to figure out. I loved that.
Then I launched Vael in the App Store. I fixed bugs and added features. But I barely talked about it, didn’t market it, and eventually stopped using it myself. It turns out I’m not much of a journaler…
I liked the idea of Vael, and I loved building it. Once it existed, though, it didn’t have much of a place in my day. That was a useful thing to learn, even if it took a few months of work to get there. So I turned my attention to something I use every day but have never been entirely happy with: todo lists.
I’ve been a productivity geek since high school. How many teenagers did you know in the late nineties who carried a Palm Pilot? Well, an orange Handspring Visor, actually. Once I started working full-time, I discovered things like Inbox Zero and Kinkless GTD. I’ve paid for every version of OmniFocus since the first one. Despite that investment, I’ve also spent an unreasonable amount of money trying other task managers. Remember The Milk, Tasks Pro, Things, Todoist, TickTick, Wunderlist. I’ve given a lot of them a good go.
The habit that stuck most came from an Asian Efficiency workflow for OmniFocus: review your list each morning, flag what you intend to do, then spend the day in a Today view showing those tasks alongside anything due or overdue. That suited me. I could keep track of everything without having to look at everything all day. I also appreciated a regular review, particularly the part where you admit you’re never going to do something and delete it. But even with a setup I liked, I kept wanting a simpler experience. Less structure to maintain. Fewer decisions about where something belonged. After years of trying other people’s tools, I had a fairly good sense of what I wanted to try building.
That’s where my design studio, Sketchy Horizon, comes in. It’s a home for the apps I’m making, starting with tools I want to use myself. The first is Float, a to-do app for iPhone and Mac.
Float is built around one list. You float the things you want to keep in view and let the rest wait until you need them. There are no projects or folders. You can surface something to the top or sink it to the bottom as its importance changes. Every so often, a feature called Low Tide prompts you to review things you haven’t looked at in a while. A little help keeping the list from becoming a collection of abandoned intentions. You can turn that off, too.
I’ve been using Float every day for the last few months. That already feels like an important difference from my first app. I’ve tried to make it feel simple and a little fun, too. Something I enjoy opening and keeping beside me while I work.
I’ve been exploring notes for similar reasons. Logseq showed me how useful a daily note could be: somewhere to write without first creating a document, naming it, and deciding where it belonged. More recently, Agenda has made me appreciate having notes connected to my calendar and meetings. Those experiences are finding their way into others apps I’m working on (there’s more to figure out there, but I’m using early builds daily as well). Using these things gives me a reason to keep working on them after the initial excitement wears off.
A couple of lessons from this year are shaping what I do next.
Craft & Systems taught me that I loved creating a publication with its own name, look, and feel. I’m an old man who still finds that idea appealing. But it also meant another website to maintain, an audience to build, and a newsletter to grow. I wanted somewhere to write, but I hadn’t really wanted another undertaking around the writing. So I’ve brought those posts back here.
Vael taught me to start with something I already use and build a version that works better for me. That gives me a reason to keep using and improving it after the fun of building it wears off.
It also gave me firsthand experience of something I already knew in principle: putting an app in the App Store doesn’t do much on its own. With Float, I want to give finding those first users, hearing what they think, and talking about the product some of the care I’ve given to building it. That comes less naturally to me. I’d usually rather open the project and make something.
Heading into 2027, I have a clearer sense of where I want to spend my personal time and energy. I’ll keep writing here about design, leadership, and whatever else I’m thinking about. Sketchy Horizon gives the apps and other creative work a home of their own.
I don’t know yet what will come of them. For now, I’m enjoying having things of my own to make, use, and care about. And when I sit down to write, I have something new to draw from.