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2026

A Year of Decisions at Knapsack

Last year, I made the decision to join Knapsack, a design systems startup, as a Staff Engineer.

"You did WHAT?"

Is the first comment I get from friends and folks in my network. I get it ! I was "fiercely independent" for about a decade. Building startups and consulting with amazing record labels, game devs and other non-enterprise folk.

Well here's my summary: I went looking for the AI-native action, and found that – in three different ways – everywhere I expected the action to be, it had already moved: from the delivery surface to the decision surface.

Two Perspectives on UXDX NYC: An Engineer's Perspective

Originally published on the Knapsack blog

This post first appeared on the Knapsack blog on June 4, 2026, as the second of two UXDX NYC recaps — Carly's designer's perspective came first.

Last week, Carly's recap of UXDX NYC landed on the line "AI is an amplifier of whatever discipline you brought with you."

Here's mine from the engineering seat — three days, eight tracks, and a room that kept arguing about the same thing in different costumes: tension and what to do with it.

Democracy and fiber cable - exploring design system maturity through analogy

In my early days at Knapsack (aka a few weeks ago) I would ask Robin "What's a Design System?" as kind of a joke.

Over time, it's become clear that there's no clear answer to this question. Robin's writing often focuses on the challenges and approaches a design system takes to problem solving - not splitting hairs about what a DS actually is.

In this Dan Mall video, the challenge of definition is illustrated: a dozen definitions and six types are offered to attempt to describe design systems. This includes definitions like:

"Any set of decisions governed across an organization" Hayley Hughes, Trust Between Teams

and

The official story of how your organization designs and builds digital interfaces. Brad Frost, Design systems are for user interfaces