Compromise and Ambition: My Engineering Values

Every decision is a tradeoff. I accept that. But I also want the work to be beautiful, easy to use, fantastic, fast, and cheap. I want it all. The way through is clarity: name what we’re optimizing for now, and don’t lose sight of the rest.

Principles I try to embody

• People first: Accessibility and clarity beat cleverness.
• Performance as kindness: Fast apps are respectful.
• Maintainability over novelty: Future me is on the team.
• Tools as amplifiers: AI helps me translate ideas into reality when focus slips.

Great engineering is taste plus empathy. We deserve tools and products that feel good to use.

Refusing false choices

I won’t accept that “fast” means “ugly,” or that “beautiful” means “slow,” or that “secure” means “unusable.” It’s harder, but that tension is where the best work happens.

The craft triangle I actually use

I like to name the tradeoff explicitly for each project:

• Experience: How delightful and accessible does it feel?
• Performance: How fast and resource‑friendly is it?
• Cost/Operations: How simple and affordable is it to run?

We pick one to lead, one to support, and refuse to tank the third. That refusal is where creativity shows up. Maybe we give up a shiny animation to keep memory flat. Maybe we use a simpler API if it removes a whole class of failure. The point is to choose on purpose—not because a library made the choice for us.

Design budgets as acts of care

Performance budgets and a11y budgets are love letters to future users. We decide up front: pages under 150KB gzipped, LCP under 2.5s, no component ships without a keyboard and screen reader pass. These constraints don’t slow teams down—they free us from re‑litigating basics.

Compromise without compromising

There’s a texture difference between compromise (tradeoffs we make in the open) and compromising (settling for worse outcomes to move on). We practice the first and avoid the second. If the work isn’t good yet, we name why and improve it rather than burying it in Jira.

How AI fits these values

AI lets me turn intention into artifacts faster. It shortens the gap between “I know what this should feel like” and “there’s a prototype on the screen.” But it doesn’t make taste or ethics optional—it makes them more necessary. The responsibility is still ours.