Fabio Azevedo

Senior Design Engineer at @float

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

New portfolio launch day. After a long time of keeping it aside, I finally found the time to do it. Hello 2018.

↓ https://t.co/My2daPECs5

[David Li @daviddotli]

Paint with squishy sea creatures in Splash Canvas, a web toy I created for Google Arts & Culture. Play with it at https://t.co/hVt3cUevZk
Procedural audio by @krighxz, easel model by @ugstuho

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

Treating "taste" as something that can be codified into a skill feels a bit like trying to codify common sense into a common-sense.md. The moment you fully formalize it, you have captured a snapshot, not the living thing itself.

[Raphael Schaad @raphaelschaad]

I’ve always felt that abundance makes excellence relatively rarer.

Today I figured out why exactly.

And it’s not doomer news, because it makes excellence also more likely:

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@jose_9maria Parabéns atrasados! :)

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@benhylak There's been a bit of disproportionate attention on what is quite a banal interaction animation, but since we are here: the location tag icon is animating on hover even when disabled. :) cc @benjitaylor

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@oguzyagizkara @readme @LueStudio Really good execution there.

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@pushmatrix This is great. Are you using https://t.co/T1XgvnKlzX then?

[Raven Kwok @RavenKwok]

Soundtrack composed by @the3ASiC . Visual programmed by yours truly. Enjoy.

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@mymind Slack.

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

The nuance here is that there are contexts where temporarily optimizing for speed makes sense (early exploration, prototypes). Just like there are times in life where optimizing for income is rational. The problem is when that mindset becomes the default operating mode.

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

Optimizing for speed in product development is like optimizing for money in a career. Both are important, but when treated as primary goals, they tend to distort decision making. They work better as outcomes of doing the right things well, not as the things you aim at directly.

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@colmtuite @base_ui Input with mention support

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

when software had a soul

there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive.

the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine.

software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive.

the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different.

nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making.

somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth.

A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing.
now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off.

and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman.

now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero.

which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch.

when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void.

this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out.

here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point.

AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence.

the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice.

if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it.

that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@joshpuckett Haha, there was a time when I was hooked on his videos. I will definitely go back and rewatch some!

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@raphaelschaad Just learned some pieces are made in Portugal, and there's a shop in the city I live in: https://t.co/v2M8MOnb4G.

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@raphaelschaad Didn't know the brand. Looks good indeed.

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@raunofreiberg Nice work! Quick question: does the square on the home button look slightly misaligned, or is it just me?

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@joshpuckett That submenu is particularly nice!

[Fabio Azevedo @naso]

@artman Never made it to WebSummit before. Guess I was just waiting for this talk.

[Matt Perry @mattgperry]

Hello, here's a brain dump of everything I know about animation performance.

By replacing a single global CSS variable with JS animations, I took style recalculations on a popular portfolio website down from a whopping 8ms to nanoseconds. That and much more in this post.