Hardware
MacBook Pro (work) + MacBook Air (personal)
Two machines. The Pro stays on the desk. The Air goes everywhere.
iPad Pro M4 + Apple Pencil Pro
The M4 version, released 2024. Thinner than my notebook. I bought it for the Pencil, not the tablet — sketching ideas in meetings is faster than any other tool I've tried. The tablet turned out to be good too.
BenQ PD2706UA 27" 4K Designer Monitor
27 inches, 4K, Pantone validated. Color accuracy matters when you're arguing about whether that blue is right.
Tenkeyless mechanical. Slightly too loud for open offices, which is part of the appeal.
The one mouse I've never needed to replace. Has survived three laptops.
Ergosphere Balanced Desk Home 230
Height adjustable, Indian-made, built properly. I stand for the first two hours of the day and sit for the rest. The standing part is still a negotiation with myself every morning.
Open-back, on-ear, looks like 1984. Sounds better than things that cost four times as much. A genuinely strange object that I keep coming back to.
IEM. Detail retrieval that surprises me every few months when I put them back on.
A tiny dongle the size of a cassette tape, which is also what it looks like on the screen. Drives the Meze Alba properly. Audiophile rabbit hole, entered reluctantly.
A portable CD player in 2026, which requires some explaining. FiiO's retro series — same family as a cassette player and turntable they also make. The DM13 is the size of a CD case, has a tiny LCD that shows a spinning tape animation while it plays, and sounds better than it has any right to. I own 200+ CDs. I've stopped counting and started stacking.
Headphone Zone Stairway Balanced Cable
A balanced cable for the Meze. The kind of purchase that requires you to explain yourself to nobody.
Noise cancellation for flights and open floors. The Sony crowd will tell you you're wrong. They might be right.
For calls. For the gym. For pretending I can't hear things.
Nikon D800 + D300s
Two DSLRs, both discontinued, both working fine. The D800 is full-frame and still embarrasses cameras half its age. The D300s is the one I take when I don't want to worry about it.
Lenses: a Nikon macro, 50mm and 85mm primes, a 300mm f/4 for when things are far away and I refuse to move, and a Tamron wide angle for everything else. Each one was a considered purchase. None of them were cheap. All of them still get used.
Nikon D40
My first camera. Doesn't work anymore. Still on the shelf. I'm not sure what that says about me but I'm not ready to find out.
The device I use most and think about the least. Which is the point.
I left the previous one on a flight. Had mixed feelings — losing it was inconvenient, but it was also a clean excuse to buy this one. The upgrade was worth it. I've stopped feeling guilty about either.
Handmade, 110gsm, dot grid. I think better on paper. I don't know why and I've stopped trying to explain it.
* Also: a Canon PIXMA MegaTank that works without complaining. I don't think about it, which means it's doing its job.
Software
Still the best design tool. Not because nothing else exists, but because the collaboration model is genuinely hard to replace.
An IDE that made me interested in code again. Which I did not expect. Claude Code inside Cursor is the combination that built this site.
My primary thinking partner. I use it for writing, research, code, and the occasional argument I need to lose gracefully.
For prototyping UI experiments fast. The hero on this site started as a Lovable experiment before it became the real thing.
AI tools I actually use
Agentic coding inside Cursor. Built most of this site. The context window gets full faster than I'd like but the output is worth it.
For writing, strategy, research synthesis, and thinking out loud at 11pm. The thinking partner I didn't know I needed.
Generative UI prototyping. Fast enough that I use it to test ideas before committing to them.
For early-stage explorations. Not a replacement for craft — a first draft generator I then argue with.
Reading
The book that made me take interaction design seriously. Still more relevant than most things published in the last five years. I've given away more copies than I can count.
Not a design book. A book about building something from nothing with incomplete information and too much stubbornness. Which is most of what design leadership actually is.
The Book of Joy — Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu
Two people who have genuinely good reasons to be unhappy, choosing not to be. I read it when the work gets heavy.
Last updated April 2026. This list changes slowly.