Kilian Valkhof

Getting Polypane ready for release

In a few weeks, Polypane version 1.0 will be released. In these past few months I’ve been hard at work getting everything ready for that release. 

The process has very little to do with the app itself and much more with creating the infrastructure around it. I thought it would be interesting to go through this to show you what it takes.

What it means to be a Firstversionist

I want to tell you about my new company Firstversionist. But to do that, I also need to tell you a little more about me.

What design tools get wrong

Modern design tools, of both the vector and code kind, are amazing pieces of software that in recent years have transformed the design profession, but none of them seem to really understand the context that we currently design for. The remnants of fixed-dimensions are still visible in all and the tools are not helping us with the considerations and trade-offs that designers have to make about their work. Here are some of the features that my ideal design tool would support natively.

Making functional CSS work for me

For a long time I’ve wanted to like functional CSS systems like Tachyons and Tailwind. The concepts behind them are really appealing to me. Using short names for CSS property:values saves a lot of typing (hello Emmet, nice to see you again!), but more importantly by limiting the amount of design choices you can make, the implementation time will go down tremendously.