A living doc: notes and resources

README.md

Hi, I'm Flo. I'm a designer turned design engineer. I didn't code much at all until November of 2024. v0 introduced me into vibe-coding, which got me building personal projects, which lead me to join the Vercel design engineering team. At Vercel, I worked on back-of-frontend and interactions at v0. Now, I work on agentic interfaces & workflows as the first founding design engineer at Paradigm.

Defining the role

• The Attributes of a Design Engineer - Kathryn Gonzalez
• Design Engineers - Maggie Appleton
• The Rosetta Stone of Design Engineering - Yann-Edern Gillet
• Design Engineering - David Hoang, Proof of Concept
• Design Engineering at Vercel - Vercel

Resources

• Design Engineer IO - Resources & job postings
• Design Engineer Club - Community of like-minded deng's

Personal perspectives

• I Think I'm a Design Engineer - Trys Mudford
• Becoming a Design Engineer - Marcel Wichmann
• Design Engineering - a State of Mind - Andy Zhang

Design engineers to study

• Rauno Freiberg
• Paco Coursey
• Maxime Heckel
• Szymon Kaliski
• Amelia Wattenberger
• Mery Kaftar
• Joe Bell
• Tikhon Belousko
• Chloe Yan
• Josh Wolk

Notes

Material understanding beats tool proficiency. Only mastering Figma and React misses the point. Design engineers think in terms of the final medium: what users actually interact with. Code and pixels become one malleable material.

Design engineering streamlines the creation process, minimizing back-and-forth. Marrying design and implementation internalizes the translation layer, rather than externalizing it into handoffs. Time collapses between idea and validation.

Prototyping is central but not the whole story. While rapid prototyping and UI implementation are visible outputs, the deeper value is in establishing strong foundations—design systems, component libraries, and patterns that elevate entire teams.