On Privacy, Design & Career: 4 Essays

Should You Leave Red Herrings About Yourself Online?: For most people, scattering fake biographical details online is a weak way to confuse data brokers. Brokers merge public records that cannot be fictionalized, ten planted lies cannot compete with years of automated collection, and fake facts become liabilities when an account-recovery flow asks for a previous address. Pseudonyms, compartmentalized accounts, and regular opt-outs provide more practical privacy than maintaining an improvised identity under your real name.

Finding Curated Public Domain Images: Dave Rupert lists three sources for the woodblock and lithographic illustrations he uses in blog posts: The Public Domain Review, Artvee, and Heritage Type. They fund their curation by selling prints or design assets made from the same public-domain works. I have saved all three for the next time I need a header image that is not a stock photo.

Wicked Websites: A Rogues’ Gallery: This illustrated, tongue-in-cheek catalog collects familiar web villains: dialog walls, JS-bloated homepages with autoplay video, “treasure hunt” navigation, and pre-checked marketing consent written with confusing double negatives. It is a quick chance to laugh at patterns most web developers have probably shipped at least once.

Kitty Giraudel’s Résumé: This is a useful reference rather than an article. It condenses fifteen years of engineering leadership into a readable résumé, from frontend work at Edenspiekermann to VP of Engineering roles that scaled teams beyond 35 people, alongside long-running open-source projects such as a11y-dialog and Sass Guidelines. Its structure is a good model for presenting a long, varied career to a hiring manager.