The Burden of Precision
Design tools today confine us to an unrealistic and ill-advised goal: one of perfection. Tools like Photoshop and Sketch are highly precise, and demand precise output from Designers….
Read full article at the publisher’s site: https://daneden.me/2017/11/15/the-burden-of-precision/
Featured writing
Why customer tools are organized wrong
This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.
Infrastructure shapes thought
The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.
Server-Side Dashboard Architecture: Why Moving Data Fetching Off the Browser Changes Everything
How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.
Books
The Work of Being (in progress)
A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.
The Practice of Work (in progress)
Practical essays on how work actually gets done.
Recent writing
Dev reflection - February 05, 2026
I want to talk about something I keep running into: the moment when you realize the outside of something no longer matches the inside. And what that actually costs.
Dev reflection - February 04, 2026
I've been thinking about the gap between 'it works' and 'you can use it.' These aren't the same thing, and the distance between them is where most organizational dysfunction lives.
We always panic about new tools (and we're always wrong)
Every time a new tool emerges for making or manipulating symbols, we panic. The pattern is so consistent it's almost embarrassing. Here's what happened each time.