Nesrine Changuel interviewed me for her newsletter on product delight — a topic I've thought a lot about, particularly in the context of developer tools, which have historically been... not known for delighting their users.
The conversation covers how I think about the difference between surface delight and deep delight. A lot of products reach for confetti animations and celebratory moments — and those have their place. But at GitHub, we talked about going "beyond confetti": building delight into the functional foundation of the product, not as a layer on top of it. Delight that doesn't rest on a base of accessibility, utility, and solid usability isn't really delight — it's decoration.
We also talked about "slices" as a product development philosophy: delivering complete, vertical experiences even when they're small, rather than shipping polished components that don't hang together into something a user can actually use. It's a way of ensuring that every increment of the product has real value, not just technical completeness.
The interview also touches on my academic background in distributed cognition and context-aware systems, and how that shapes the way I think about users — always situated in a context, always embedded in workflows that extend well beyond the product itself.