Designing for attention
What people give up in the first three seconds of an interface, and how teams can give it back.
Slides & recordingSpeaker & engineer
Thyda
Talks, writing and selected work on building technology that respects people's time.
A working record of talks, notes and things worth keeping. Everything here was written or spoken by Thyda.
Speaking
Conference talks, keynotes and workshops. Slides and recordings are linked from each entry.
The cost of a default
Every default is a decision somebody else made for you. A short talk on reading them properly.
Slides & recordingWriting
Notes on building software, published when they are finished rather than on a schedule.
- 2025 Interfaces that finish their sentences On completeness, dead ends, and the small kindness of a page that tells you what happens next.
- 2024 Notes on reading a codebase How to move through unfamiliar code without pretending you understood it the first time.
- 2023 Ship the boring version A short argument for the unglamorous feature list that almost always carries the product.
- 2022 What a good error message is for Not the user, the person on call. Writing for the person who has to recover the session.
Tell me what you’re building.
Talks, workshops, or a second pair of hands on a project. The reply time is usually a day.