Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton

Gergely Orosz (0:00)

What makes for a great designer or a great design engineer, and what can us software engineers learn from them? Maggie Appleton is one of the most thoughtful design engineers I know. She's worked at as an illustrator, as a designer at an AI startup, and is currently prototyping at GitHub Next. Today we talk about what is a design engineer, and why there's often a tension between engineering and design, the tools she's used before and now, and why pen and pencil is not going away even with agents. Do you still need a designer when AI can generate 20 high fidelity prototypes, and is AI design obvious to spot? And many more. If you're an engineer and want to know where design is important, and how to get better at design yourself, this episode is for you.

This episode is presented by TurboBuffer, Vectra and Fulltext Search built on object storage. It's fast, cheap and extremely scalable. Today's episode will be about design and design engineering, and so I wanted to share something visually interesting about our season sponsor Antithesis.

We already know that Antithesis verifies your system correctness by running your whole system in hostile simulation and finding bugs.

Here's a UI for casualty analysis. You can open a report for a bug and see the probability of a bug occurring throughout the timeline of the simulation. In this case, we can see that at virtual time 25, something happened that makes this bug close to 100% to occur. So we can jump to this point in virtual time simulation to read the logs. This kind of bug probability visualization is one that I've never seen before. There's also this neat log explorer. You can filter on error messages and then visualize how common or uncommon the error is over time. For example, here's looking for failing linearization failures, the purple line. And you can understand how rare or common a specific failure was. Again, I've yet to see this kind of error visualization, and I really like the innovation on the UI side. And finally, the simplified multiverse debugger.

You can go back in time and replay a debug timeline. And you can inject bash commands at any time without affecting the playback of the bug. How cool is that? For example, we're listing files in the current directory, but as you can imagine, you can go debug the whole environment so much easier. I love how the team at Antithesis are pushing what's possible with both debugging and verifying software. Head to antithesis.com/pragmatic to learn more. Maggie, welcome to the podcast.

Maggie Appleton (2:17)

Thanks, I'm thrilled to be here.

Gergely Orosz (2:18)

I've had so many guests on the podcast. No one had quite the introductory story into tech like you. How did you get into tech? And you came from a very different background, right?

Maggie Appleton (2:29)

Yes, yeah.

I mean, I came in because it was where the money was, I guess. I mean, not really. But in the sense that in university, I studied cultural anthropology, which is like my one true love, like I adore cultural anthropology. I totally fell in love with it in university.

Gergely Orosz (2:44)

What is anthropology?

Maggie Appleton (2:45)

Yeah, it's the study of human beings, which sounds impossibly broad and like how could that be a discipline. But it does it in a particular way where you go and you live with people intensely in this thing called participant observation. Usually, it was done kind of when the field was born of different cultures, of course. It was like anthropologists from the West primarily going to places like Papua New Guinea or Australia and living among traditional peoples. And then realizing how different their cultures were, not just like, oh, they eat different food, you know, they have different houses, but they have completely different understandings of like what color is. They have completely different understandings of time.

It was kind of alongside the birth of psychology, like understanding how flexible is the human mind about constructing understandings of the world.

Anthropology is really one of these eye-opening subjects when you get into it, because you can kind of get into like medical anthropology or the anthropology of sex and gender. And you just find out how extremely adaptable and fluid human beings are. And I loved it because I grew up as an expat kid overseas. So I think I was exposed early to lots of different cultures. And so it felt very natural to me to realize like, oh, the way things, people do things at home, quote unquote home would be London for me, but I left at age six, is completely different to the way they do it elsewhere. And there's no fixed way for humans to kind of construct a society or live life. And the bounds of what we think is possible is much wider than we originally assume, which is what I loved about it. So I studied it. But of course, come senior year, kind of go, right, what jobs are there available in cultural anthropology?