seanwilson

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: [email protected]

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SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

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The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

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I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

I'm still waiting for decent tooltips that are browser native. You can sort of minimally do them with the `title` attribute but they take ages to appear, can't contain HTML or styling (like bold text or images), and you can't choose their position. To do them properly with accessibility in mind (keyboard/mouse/touch support, screen reader support, keyboard focus, it's hard!), you need way too much markup with tricky custom JavaScript, and they're difficult to get right like making sure they don't render partially off-screen.

The new CSS anchor positioning and popover attribute help but something simple and built-in that doesn't require lots of wiring would be great. It's puzzling why we don't have this basic UI feature yet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_bias probably? "Omission bias is the moral judgement in which people prefer omission (inaction) over commission (action), and tend to believe harm as a result of commission more negatively than harm as a result of omission."

Isn't a big issue with Adobe that competitor apps don't stand a chance because they won't have the file saved/load support for current and past file formats that designers are forced to rely on?

Designers can't risk even pixel sized issues with the specifics of the above for daily project work, so it forces them to use Photoshop or InDesign with expensive cloud subscription plans to work with other designers and prevents them from using unsupported platforms like Linux. This kind of vendor lock-in has held back competition and created resentment for a long time.

The example of the sluggish brush rendering isn't going to be hard to fix, but network effects and 100% file support is what has made it almost impossible to compete with Adobe despite many honest attempts to make better apps.

> The current generation of math AI is not a "good citizen" in that it doesn't try to make the most elegant additions to the shared framework, but will often just rebuild everything from scratch til get to some endpoint.

> Sure, we learned if the statement is true or false; but the proof can't be merged into the pure math codebase unless it's completely rebuilt. This is thankless work that humans are unlikely to want to do, and so the "solution" instead risks leaving a desolate patch of land, where existing efforts in extending the codebase lost their motivation.

Are the AI proofs really that hard to refactor? Wouldn't the AI prover get stuck by straying too far from the safety of existing frameworks and not breaking the larger goal into smaller subgoals?

Why is coming up with a better proof (e.g. shorter, more intuitive, more general, connected to existing frameworks) thankless work? How much of this is a problem because of current incentives?

https://squoosh.app/editor is a great app to compare how well an image compresses with newer formats like AVIF and WebP, compared to JPG/PNG.

It feels more practical now to have a fast loading page with large images now without too much effort. It was far too much of a burden before to have to provide fallbacks to older formats, on top of different images for different screen sizes/densities.

Another pain is when there's no long options to use and you want to leave comments to document the short options, bash doesn't have inline comments and multiline commands break if you try to comment a line. There's awkward and verbose workarounds like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9522631/how-to-put-a-lin... but open to tips!

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: [email protected]

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: [email protected]

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

What's the problem of only keeping test 3 if it depends on test 2 and 1 passing anyway?

The article mentions not to do this because "Deleting test1 loses us another property from the Test Desiderata—tests should be specific. That’s the property of tests where, when one fails, you know exactly where the problem is." but you'll know what line it failed on. And some test runners let you break a test into steps, where groups of lines are given a description.

Or put each step + assert in a helper function (e.g. `doStep1AndAssert()`), and each test only calls these helper functions?

Nothing is perfect, but copy/pasting chunks between tests like this isn't great when you want to refactor it's repetitive to read.

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: [email protected]

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

Thanks! Any noticeable downsides?

> over time decided the Django model was actually more effective as your cue to ask whether you should have been writing a Python function instead and calling it

I get the motivation, but is disallowing brackets and proper variables really the right way to do this? These make code clearer to read and reduce duplication more than they introduce complexity so this is going too far in my opinion and feels arbitrary.

For Django's default template language, does it still have these limitations?

1. Brackets aren't allowed to help with boolean expressions like {% if a and (b or c) %}

2. You can't do basic arithmetic like {{ x * 2 }}, but you're allowed to do {{ x | add:"2" }}. There's hacks to multiply using {% widthratio a 1 b %} or division with {% widthratio a b 1 %} though (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18350630/multiplication-...).

3. You can't assign expressions to variables like {% with x = a or b %}, so you have to repeat yourself.

4. You can't capture HTML generated from template code in a variable to pass into a partial template to write slots-style HTML components e.g. {% capture x %}Hello {{ username }}{% endcapture %}{{ include "partials/header.html" with body_html=x }}.

5. You can't pass variables to model methods.

I understand there's a philosophy that templates shouldn't contain complex logic, but I find the above pretty arbitrary and leads to code that's harder to maintain. Addition is okay but not multiplication? Boolean logic is okay but not with brackets? I often have to puzzle out some way to get my code to work that goes against what I'd normally want to do, some I'm forced to duplicate template code because you can't put expressions in variables or move basic one-off logic into views (which has poor locality https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/ and makes it harder to move template snippets between pages).

It's like hiding the kitchen knives because they might be misused.

Is Jinja2 a practical alternative or there's friction to using it?

> Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic.

Hadn't seen this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

> The important metric: how long does your entire development feedback cycle take, and what portion of that time is spent waiting on your compiler?

> So far, we haven’t lost much in the switch. The type safety we gave up hasn’t been noticeable in any concrete way yet, especially considering our test coverage has never been better.

Moving to Python means you'll have quicker compile times but now you'll need a bigger test suite which will take longer to run to get feedback after code edits? In TypeScript, you can compile and execute without waiting on type checking, an option like that would help?

Some recommendations based on studies here https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/

> In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.

> we strongly recommend that designers allow users to switch to dark mode if they want to — for three reasons: (1) there may be long-term effects associated with light mode; (2) some people with visual impairments will do better with dark mode; and (3) some users simply like dark mode better.

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: [email protected]

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

Tweaks to my accessible color palette editor that helps you create Tailwind style palettes for web/UI design:

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

Most tools only let you enter a single color and then attempt to autogenerate or use AI to create the other tints/shades, which often don't do a great job and are really limiting when you're creating branded palettes.

The focus on this tool is to let you tweak every tint/shade while keeping an eye on accessible contrast. The curve based editor shows you how the H/S/L values of your colors vary across a color scale and is meant to make the editing process quick and intuitive enough that you won't want to give up control to autogeneration.

This is still adding wrapper elements to get the layout you want. Even if you can force yourself to come up with some vague semantics behind the wrapper elements (that you wouldn't have otherwise added), I don't see how it's much better than using a generic tag and it shows you need to modify HTML to modify the presentation in practice.

Visual design involves a lot of grouping and aligning elements, and there isn't always semantic reasons for it. Grouping is usually best done in the HTML, so it's hard keep this part of the visual design out of your HTML.

I was thinking more of a document with multiple paragraphs and images. Here the <body> element is serving as the wrapper element, that gives you a hook to get the layout you want. But when you're not lucky enough to have a semantic wrapper tag like that, you've usually got to add a generic tag.

The concept makes more sense for styling simple document style pages from 20 years ago, but it hasn't scaled to modern designs, complex web UIs and responsive pages that we want to code now, which isn't that surprising.

> we would all be writing purely semantic html with completely orthogonal and swappable css. And today literally no one designs web sites that way - html today is mostly specific to presentation

I think of HTML + CSS as the presentation layer now, and the data lives in your e.g. database and Markdown files, so the data and its presentation are still separate enough.

The idea of just swapping out the CSS to completely restyle a complex site is nice, but people need to accept this hasn't worked out (and not because devs are bad at CSS) and move on.

> If you “View Source” on any “real” website, you’ll notice that everything has layers and layers of wrapper elements, so you might be tricked into thinking that wrappers are how you solve layout problems. I can’t really agree or disagree here, as I never wrote “production” CSS, but, in my experience, it’s much easier to understand if you do the opposite — restrict yourself to using only markup-meaningful semantic tags, and then figure out CSS which works with the markup you have.

CSS isn't powerful enough by itself to create any layout you want without modifying the HTML. You almost always need wrapper elements to group elements you want to align together for presentation purposes only (e.g. "a vertically centered row containing one paragraph next to two vertically stacked images"), so there often aren't semantic HTML tags that would make sense.

It's similar to how you use numerous groups/frames in design apps like Inkscape and Figma to help align elements, where nobody would suggest you were a bad designer for using groups that don't have semantic meaning.

You can only really avoid wrapper elements for simple Markdown style pages with simple designs, where the CSS for that is straightforward.

I think in these discussions, it needs to be clearer how complex the page designs being discussed are. The CSS advice that makes sense for simple Markdown style pages is very different to what makes sense for a complex web app UI or a highly designed marketing page.

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: [email protected]

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

> I keep seeing programmers say how angry it makes them that people are willing to write detailed CLAUDE.md and PROJECT.md files for Claude to use, but they weren't willing to write them for their coworkers.

Similar for adding static type checking, which makes it easier for AI and coworkers to understand the code, catch mistakes, and to refactor. And now there's coders willing to add static type checking to help AI but didn't see the benefit before for some reason.

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: [email protected]

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: [email protected]

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

Note: For large projects, my partner usually assists me in the background (I’m working on starting a design studio with her in the future)

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Email [email protected] with a short description of 1) your project 2) how you think I can help 3) the business outcome you’re looking for and 4) any deadlines. I can get back to you in one working day to arrange a call to discuss a quote and how we can work together!

Anyone else have CI checks that source map files are missing from the build folder? Another trick is to grep the build folder for several function/variable names that you expect to be minified away.

I like laptop trackpads because it means you're always close to the keyboard, so you can easily switch between cursor and typing without only relying on one. It's good for UI design work for example.