Backyard Baseball, remade as an industry draft board. Ridd and Tommy Geoco put the design Twitter on a bleacher as cartoon kids, each with a scouting report, a portfolio link, and a little prop at their feet. You fill seven slots (a design leader, two product designers, a web designer, a design engineer, a brand designer, and a wildcard) under a limited budget, based on the follower count. The amount of fun little details is absolutely mind-blowing, and you’ll catch them only by exploring the community and drafting the dream team. Now, please excuse me as I go send some paper planes.

Same premise as Backyard Designers above, except Gabriel Valdivia built the whole game. Craftdeck is a playable CCG with mana, taunts, campaign bosses, and hundreds of designers pulled from real X profiles. Look for me as the Open Palette with a Version Control ability — this checks out.

Drew Wilson, founder of Opacity and the person behind ValioCon, is teasing another game that renders designers as horses, each with a custom neigh sound. I don’t want to spoil the end result, but please go check it out.

Anthony Hobday on why most design career advice comes from people who don’t hire designers and reflects a single lucky path. The practical core: a five-minute curriculum, ways to look impressive without impressive jobs, and the signs an org genuinely values interface design. His argument that one strong credential can cover for a weak portfolio pairs neatly with ​“Components Are Dead” below — both circling what actually holds value as the job changes.

Luis Ouriach makes the provocative case that when LLMs make code cheap to write, edit, and migrate, the contribution model and the component-as-source-of-truth lose their reason to exist. His point is that consistency was always carried by tokens, not components, so a well-defined token set could govern ten different LLM-generated inputs at once. He stops short of full obituary, asking whether components live on as the unit of constraint.

Rauno Freiberg, a design engineer widely respected for his UI craft, keeps a running collection of short notes on the small decisions that make interfaces feel right. One entry works through why an animation delay meant to highlight a scrolled-to message backfired and felt more awkward; another walks through the redesign of cards. It’s the kind of thinking-out-loud that can teach more than any tutorial.

Just updated my annual Config Study Guide with the remainder of the recordings — all 70 talks are now organized and ready to watch. (Only the Learning Lab videos are still unavailable.) This is a practical way to work through the talks at your own pace, mark what you’ve watched, and trade recommendations with friends and colleagues.

New weekly live show by Ridd and Tommy Geoco, focused on design, tools, and the people behind the software.

A large survey of tech workers in 2026 finds the industry splitting into two groups: roughly half feel amplified by AI, while 14% feel destabilized and 12% are simply resentful. Designers and researchers are overrepresented in the fragile half. What’s striking is that the fear isn’t ​“AI will take my job” — only 22% name that. The bigger worry is unsustainable pace and doing more work for the same pay. Career optimism is down, burnout is up, and 53% would actively discourage someone from entering their field.