Designing the wrong way is finally right

I've been designing software professionally for over 15 years, and for almost all of those years, I did it exactly the wrong way. In 2013, I created prototypes in Rails because it was easier to evaluate if we were making good decisions. In 2014, I made hand-coded websites since they were simple to ship and maintain. In 2016, I co-built a weather web app that eventually became a proper iOS app for the fun of it. In 2021, I finally learned how to design products in Figma. And then I worked at Figma for three and a half years, helping to launch a bunch of awesome creative tools for designers and developers. For most of that time, I rarely embraced anything trendy in design at all. When Flash was big, I was doing HTML. When people were busy designing software in Photoshop, I was hacking the web. When Sketch and InVision were hot, I spent my days with chalkboard sketches and Sublime Text. Instead of designing mobile apps in Figma, I just worked directly in Xcode and Android Studio. I'm not…