Notes on
Design & Fintech

Field notes on fintech and commerce, payments UX, remote work, hiring, and how AI is changing the way designers actually work.

28 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

I Benchmarked Seven German Shops for a Week. The Best One Wasn't a Shop.

Five category levels to reach a pack of batteries. Airbnb gets me to a London apartment with zero — and still none of the eight will tell you why it recommends anything.

8 Jun 2026 · 4 min read

Generalist vs Specialist Is the Wrong Debate

The fork that matters is IC depth versus a leadership track. One of them has a ceiling stapled to the title.

2 Jun 2026 · 5 min read

What They Actually Hire For

I read 21 Senior PD job descriptions and counted what repeats. The requirements list is not the same thing as the screening criteria.

28 May 2026 · 4 min read

Every Job Description Is a Lie

Every JD reads like a wish list written by committee. That's not a Senior Designer — that's a Design Director without the title or the comp.

25 May 2026 · 4 min read

Designing for Kazakhstan from Bangkok

I design payment flows for Kazakhstani merchants from 4,500 km away. What that distance takes from the work — and what it gives back.

21 May 2026 · 3 min read

Merchants Trust Their Workaround, Not Your Flow

A café owner logged every QR transaction by hand next to a working confirmation screen. That's not a UX failure — it's a trust failure.

5 May 2026 · 5 min read

I Rebuilt My Portfolio with Claude Code

Why I traded Framer for pure HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS — and the Claude Code skills that actually made it work.