 I'm a designer who, amongst my design click, has been known as the technical person, and amongst the DevRel folks, you're known as the creative person, even though you're a developer. So I suppose the question is, are designers born or are they made, and the same as our developers born and are they made? You could say there are people who are going to affirm that it's just you've either got it or you haven't. You're born with it or you don't have it, right? And then there are the other people who say like, if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything. I feel like I want to be somewhere in the moderate middle there and say, for example, like not talking about designing or developing, no matter how fast I run, I will never beat Usain Bolt or how well I sing, I'm never going to sing as well as Beyonce or somebody like that. But if I took singing lessons or running lessons, I'm sure I could improve where I'm at. I mean, as a designer, I'm supposed to say, no, we are born because we're in an ivory tower and we shouldn't be challenged. Everything we should say is as is. But the longer I've been in industry, some of the best designers I've come across come from a computer science background, or even completely unrelated to art, it almost feels like they are more cultured, they're with other disciplines, therefore they're almost bad designers. Yeah, I think there's probably a function of opportunity in there, right? So I don't know, but my feeling is that it's a function of both your opportunities and the context in which you grow up, so the nurture, I suppose, and then your suitability to a particular area. Some people will just find it easier to play musical instruments. So from my own experience is that I would never introduce myself as a designer. I find that strange because your design skills are quite respectable. Thank you. And you occupy a very interesting space where you're someone who can speak code, or developer, and you're someone who has a strong appreciation for design and can apply it. But it's interesting because I had that opportunity. My first job as a developer was in a design house where I was working alongside print designers day in, day out. And I was exposed to kerning, ledding, widows, all these bits of terminology, and I could see those things, and I could start to see the principles that were at play, and then I tried to apply them myself, got it wrong, and I adjusted and tried to course correct. And still that's a process, but it's the same process that I go through with programming. It's the same mindset. The mindset is simply I want to understand what the principles are at play here, and I'll figure some of those out by myself, but I'll figure some of those out because other people have figured them out before me. And so I'm interested in improving in that area. So again, the desire is there in me to actually improve. But I would say my aptitude is more skewed towards development. I find it easier to adapt and adopt those principles more readily than the design one. I always find that interesting as a developer is able to navigate both. I mean, with your media app, how are you doing that? Because you feel that there is something you have to be born with, but you're kind of proving my point that you're not. Well, I mean, you'd have to have a control me somewhere else that was not given the same experience and then put them in a similar situation and see what happens. If you give, in fact, you probably want two me's, one that's just purely done development, throw them into the design and see what happens. And one who's done design and throw them into development and see what happens. My attitude towards design is it was something I wanted to understand better. It was something I wanted to be able to do. I was surrounded by designers in my first professional role who could design. And I was comfortable with my own ability as a developer. Having done a degree in coding, I felt like, actually, this isn't the thing that I kind of need to prove myself as being able to do amongst my peers, the bits that they can do that I can't. I feel inferior now, and that's probably playing into some of my psyche. Right, I better learn how to do that. There was no benefit to me other than I can now do something else. So as one last point on that, it's like, do you think it makes you a much more better developer to be aware of design? Like, do you feel much more cultured developer? I mean, because from my point of view, I think as a designer who knows, I mean, I say, I know how to code. When I say that amongst DevRel Filks, they laugh like, oh, you do this. We still laugh. Yeah, well, you know, HTML, CS, that's not real code. But it is, it's really hard. It feels, to me, it feels like you become a much more cultured designer because you're aware of the platform. Some of the best and exciting projects for me that I've ever done have been the ones where a designer set out the goal and the overall field, but they had no idea that that was unachievable. And so it fell to me as on the development side to both maintain their aesthetic, but achieve the thing that they dreamt of. So that was a really, they'll be technically challenging. So it sort of, it scratched that itch of my personality. So sometimes you want the people who just like, I don't know what's possible. So I did a thing. And now you're forced to make that thing a reality and that can be a really good testing ground. In the middle bit where you're actually, like I said, I had to maintain an aesthetic and do some code. That crossover point, rather than it being over the wall and a sort of a strict silo, you want that transition point where you've got somebody who can go between those two worlds and say, look, I understand the aesthetic. I understand actually what you're trying to achieve visually and from a UX point of view, and all these are the aspects of the design. But I also know the technical limitations are there or there are more suitable ways to achieve what you were trying to achieve. So how about we do that? So that is that point of compromise in the middle that actually has been most valuable to me. If you're a designer and you take the view that you can't develop and therefore you won't develop, are you holding yourself back? I think that's, I mean, maybe, maybe in some context, certainly for that crossover point, yes. And the same with a developer. Can you be a perfectly good developer without designing? Yes. Would you be a more empathetic developer if you knew more about design and aesthetic? Yes, I think you would. It's how far you can get along that path is how much, partly how much time you want to invest, how much of yourself you want to invest and a function of your suitability to that task and how easy you find it to take on, say, the principles. Even if you don't say, I'm going to be the most creative designer out there, I'm a developer, I'm going to be the most creative designer. Even if you say, I'm just going to try and understand why line length matters, why letting and kerning matter. So I understand the principles or easing of motion, why that matters and how that plays into things and I'm going to invest just a little bit of my time. That goes an awful, awful long way to actually, in my experience, of improving you in other ways, it just broadens your horizons. So in reality, it doesn't matter if they're born or made, it's just about the individual wanting to? Well, we were all born not knowing how to, say, write or speak or walk and yet we all managed to get to at least, you know, many of us get to that point, right? Well, I don't know about us, but... And so there's clearly a sense in which you can always improve and I think you should always look to improve and I think, certainly in what we do, improving across that boundary is helpful to you and it's helpful to everybody else if you do. I won't be doing design full-time, but I feel like I should know enough about a designer's work process, about a designer's tools, about a designer's language in order to be able to collaborate with them.