Evidence-Based Design

I’d known who Jeff was for a long time, but for all the local developer events I went to, I’d never met him. So when I was told, on the first day back at work after a vacation, that Jeff would be joining the team, I joked that I was surprised to hear that he actually existed.

Turns out that he did, and he was great. He had amazing insight. Ask him a question about something, and he’d have an interesting answer. In the middle of a design meeting where he hadn’t talked much, he’d suddenly pipe up with something totally off the wall and totally right. He was adding wonderful little touches to everything.

Jeff would mail out the weirdest links. He loved random internet shit. He had an oddly insightful picture or Youtube video to respond to any email thread. I wish I had some of my old work email — there was some good stuff in there. I remember he mailed out this link shortly before we left the company. He thought this book was freaking hilarious — he was chuckling about it for weeks. This album cover game drove an email thread for a few days too; that’s where all those examples came from.

I wish I would have said goodbye the last time I saw him. I think he was smoking in front of the building as I drove away. I figured we’d all hear about what he was going to do next. I wish this wouldn’t have been it.