Hey there!
I love infrastructure. I also love sharing things. This creates an unfortunate tension for me because it’s hard to shout from the rooftops when you’re digging tunnels deep underground.
This has been the dynamic for me this year. Since declaring systems bankruptcy, I’ve been hard at work building the systems that build the systems that build the systems. It’s turtles all the way down.
But holy crap, all this subterranean work is actually starting to yield results. There’s still loads to do, but I'm thrilled that things are starting to come together. Hard-earned software and human processes are clicking into place. I FEEL it. Even though I’m still neck-deep in systems land, we’re actually making headway on the things that are worth shouting from the rooftops. Like this!
Course progress!
Chapter 3 of my Atomic Design Certification Course is finally DONE! This chapter was one of the hardest things I’ve ever put together: a practical, hands-on journey through the levels of systematic design, code, and documentation. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the human side of making and maintaining design systems, and when those chapters are done, at long last so is the entire course!
Our AI & Design Systems Course now has 14.5 hours of video. FOURTEEN AND A HALF. 🤯 This includes our community jam sessions, TJ’s LinkedIn videos, and the emerging final course content. We’re now Mark Twaining our way into a shorter letter, replacing these non-course videos with tighter and more-produced videos/demos. Which, speaking of Chapter 1 is allllllmost fully done, and the full course structure is now in place on the course platform. Preorder and check it out!
Rather than creating the AI & Design Systems course linearly, we’re approaching the creation of this course by building up its fidelity — like a Progressive JPEG — for a few important reasons:
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We don’t want to hold practical and in-the-weeds demos hostage while we produce the high-level course material
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This stuff is changing LITERALLY EVERY DAY, so we want the course to be extensible and modular so that we can add new demos for new concepts
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We have me, TJ, and Ian all making stuff so can cover more ground
We’re hard at work producing things every day, and the present course progress looks something like this:
Meanwhile, our Subatomic Design Tokens Course continues to serve as a crucial foundational bedrock, especially with new AI design tools seemingly falling out of the sky every damn day claiming to “Use your design tokens!” I’ve been so thankful we have a solid token system in place as it allows me to wield these new technologies in ways that feel familiar and useful. For instance, here’s me wiring up my design token system to GPT Image 2 to produce stuff like this:
There’s a lot to unpack here, and I’m thankful for friends like Jem Gold who chat with me and write stuff like this to help push my own thinking about what’s possible.
I’ve been putting EVERYTHING from our courses to use in my daily work, so as a reminder you can get a MEGABUNDLE of all three courses for a significant discount.
Wake Up Excited!
Also, two amazing new Wake Up Excited! episodes came out:
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Giorgia Lupi discusses her recovery from Long COVID, which was beautifully articulated in this visually-stunning NYTimes piece. We discuss retraining your brain, trauma recovery, cultivating gratitude, and how the arts articulate things in a way nothing else can.
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Ben Callahan joins me to talk about building healthy communities, the critical importance of values, humanizing work, how hard things force you to reevaluate things, the sharing culture of the web, lessons from music, the cosmos, and a whole lot more.
I’d love it if you subscribed to Wake Up Excited! on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
So yeah! Lots of stuff to be excited about, and this is just scratching the surface! I’ll have more to share soon.
I’ll leave you with this question: what system or process do you have in place that feels genuinely hard-won?
Love always,
