# Your own site as proof · The career Maggie Appleton’s method was to “find and follow people doing design engineering work in public,” and her [collection](https://maggieappleton.com/design-engineers) lists only people who publish. A personal site is an interface you designed, built, and shipped alone; by Jim Nielsen’s rule that the only source of truth is the website people use, it is where your taste (what you chose to make) and your craft (down to the unit the font size is set in) are on the record at once. ### The site as the demo Andrew Swank’s [site](https://andrewswank.com) is the most literal. “A designer and engineer by design,” he opens a “This site” section with “I invite you to play with this site. I’ve built this from scratch and welcome feedback.” The listed features are decisions: layout and type sized with vmin and rem to set the baseline font size; max() and round() to snap to a 4-pixel grid; HSL custom properties so colours animate without dulling (“hover over the logo”); Roboto Flex animated with font-variation-settings. > Figure. CSSIllustration The project pages do the same. For [Assistant](https://andrewswank.com/project/assistant/), as a UX Engineer, he built a no-code voice prototyping toolkit “reaching 400+ cross-functional users and powering 8000+ voice prototypes”: a Chrome extension for Google Slides, a speech service, a React component library. For [Google Flights](https://andrewswank.com/project/datepicker/) he made the mobile datepicker “later selected as the Google standard, used by billions,” adopted by Material Design and MUI; his reference implementations cut engineering time by more than half. The page runs a “fairly faithful” recreation: start with departure or return, and if the return precedes the departure “the system automatically swaps them to create a valid range”; days show the cheapest round trip before you pick and the trip total after. Demonstrated, not described. Aside Swank’s numbers are his own. The recreation omits optimisations (pseudo-elements, view recycling) and features (dates in search params, low-price highlights), “but from an interaction point-of-view, this is accurate.” ### Shrine and restraint Kathryn Gonzalez’s [Personal Website, Personal Shrine](https://www.ryngonzalez.com/blog/personal-website-personal-shrine) (July 2023) is about what a site is for. Rebuilt “a half-dozen or so times over the last 15 years,” each version is “a reflection set in a particular time” of where she is; after eight years of neglect she set three principles: share openly and consistently, reflect the fullness of who she is, and play. The build: Notion through react-notion-x, pre-rendered with Next.js, a /bits page for weekly learnings, Framer Motion stickers “to introduce fun, physical moments.” She closes with Clay Shirky on Shinto shrines, lasting because of the rebuilding, and names Lee Byron, who “somehow straddled design and engineering,” and Petter Nilsson: “Two colors, left-aligned, one font-size.” Paco Coursey’s [Redesign 2021](https://paco.me/writing/redesign-2021) stripped paco.me to documents and links: “Instead of adding as many animations, features, and case studies as possible, this iteration reflects my values of performance, simplicity, and craft.” It was hard because “it feels like everything I build must use some novel interaction” (an infinite canvas, a little OS, weather per page), but the old site “felt disingenuous and abandoned,” and “If you leave your home unlocked, it is no longer a home, but an exhibition.” The colophon is the craft: Inter, Söhne, Newsreader, Next.js with JavaScript disabled. The interactions live on a [craft page](https://paco.me/craft): exclusion tabs after Stripe, an iOS 16 dropdown expanding behind a clip-path, three approaches to blur, Linear’s timeline with native scrolling. ### Logs, gardens, verbs Rauno Freiberg’s [craft page](https://rauno.me/craft) is a dated log: 78 entries from 2021 to 2026, each Read Essay, View Prototype, or View Production, no case studies, and a footer standard: “Make it fast. Make it beautiful. Make it consistent. Make it carefully. Make it timeless. Make it soulful. Make it.” Maggie Appleton’s [garden](https://maggieappleton.com) is “imperfect notes, essays, and ideas growing slowly over time,” [built herself](https://maggieappleton.com/colophon) in Astro and MDX, Canela, a Utopia fluid type scale, and a **growth stage** (Maggie Appleton's label on every post for how complete it is: seedlings for rough early ideas, budding for work cleaned up and clarified, evergreen for work that is reasonably complete.) (seedling, budding, evergreen) on every post; her design engineers note is budding. Jim Nielsen’s [about page](https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/about/) counts 805 posts and 580k words; his [home page](https://www.jim-nielsen.com) is verbs (I’m Blogging, I’m Collecting iOS Icons, I’m Baking Pies). Emil Kowalski’s [home page](https://emilkowal.ski) is a few sentences, four projects (animations.dev, Sonner, aiforui.dev, Vaul), and a writing list. Each reads as a portfolio without containing one. Jim’s [Job Screening Blog Post](https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/design-engineer-job-screener/) (November 2024) is two GIFs of a button click; in one the heading shifts up a pixel. “Can you tell the difference between them? Do you care? If not, we might not be a good fit.” The screen runs both ways. [Sanding UI](https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/sanding-ui/), where he fixes the dead click zone a flexbox gap left between a radio and its label, shows what he notices better than a résumé line. Kathryn says of her [2015 piece](https://www.ryngonzalez.com/blog/designing-search-for-doordash) on DoorDash search: “This is the article that got me the most important job of my life (so far).” So build your own site, not from a template, because the choices are the point. Make one page where a component runs. Keep a dated log. Write up the splinter, not just the finish; nobody has to take your word for it.