Hey, I'm Alex — a design engineer with 12 years of making software feel like something.

Right now I lead UX for developer tools at Marriott International, designing the internal platforms that engineering teams use to ship infrastructure.

Before that, I spent years inside agencies, dev shops, and startups — wearing every hat, shipping everything from brand systems to full product builds. Somewhere in the middle I started a design collective called Collectively Made.

My Book

Recent

guide

The Claude Code + Obsidian Vault Pattern for Design Teams

A working setup using Obsidian, Claude Code, and Design Decision Records — durable context that compounds across sessions instead of evaporating with each new chat.
note

The Ladder, Pulled Up

Taste is the moat. Fine. But taste was always downstream of reps, and AI has eaten the reps. A working theory of what the new apprenticeship has to look like.
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We Swapped the Motor

AI has removed the friction that kept my ideas theoretical — and confronted me with the harder question of what's actually worth building.
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Dad's Eulogy

The eulogy I gave for my father, Daniel Russell, on October 5th during the Jewish High Holidays.
experiment
guide

A Local-First UX Research Workflow in Cursor

How I stopped copying interview notes into chat windows and built a research pipeline that lives in my codebase, processes transcripts automatically, and compounds over time.
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What Does UX Mean When Your Users Are Engineers?

Designing for developers means throwing out half the UX playbook and replacing ease with something harder to achieve: trust.
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Design Systems Are Not a Product

On the quiet trap of treating your component library like a startup, and why the best design system is the one you forget about.