Me

I’m Danny McGee (he/him), an aesthetically-motivated software engineer with a background in design. I’m proud to have earned a reputation for going above and beyond to make everything I touch really pretty (and to make the designers I work with really happy), having been variously known as “the CSS whisperer,” “the UI guy,” “Hey, can you help me center this div?” and similar honorifics.

I got my start as a web designer with some light coding duties in 2011, and transitioned to a full-time developer role in 2016, which is also when I started toying with game development in my free time.

Nowadays I dabble in a lot of areas, but I’ve mostly been honing a specialty for UI/UX tooling since 2019, when I took the lead on developing a proprietary design system and UI library for TackleBox , an innovative productivity app with a lot of complex interactivity that wasn’t well-served by existing off-the-shelf UI toolkits.

My enthusiasm for user experience bleeds into a bit of an obsession for developer experience, leading my partner to observe that I seem to enjoy building tools more than I enjoy building the stuff that the tools were supposed to help me build. I have a knack for designing intuitive abstractions and workflows that help teams deliver on objectives faster, without compromising on vision or leaving edge cases unhandled.

The blog

Part notes-to-self for future reference, part stream-of-consciousness brain dump, part informational resource for anyone who might be curious or learning. I hope you’ll find it useful, but mostly I write because it’s useful to me.

All the content and code here, except where otherwise noted, was authored by me, a human, without assistance from AI.

The tech

This site is mostly statically-generated HTML and CSS (powered by Astro and Sass ), with some small sprinklings of JavaScript where warranted (mostly TypeScript operating on the raw DOM API, but a bit of SolidJS here and there). Content is authored in Markdown and transformed via ReMark and ReHype (with a comically over-engineered custom transformer for the code blocks).

I aim for this site to be uncompromisingly accessible, but I’m not perfect, so if you run into any issues or annoyances using it with (or without) assistive tech, I’d be grateful if you let me know!

The design

The responsive page layouts were mocked up in Figma, while most of the visual design was done directly in the code. It’s not particularly original — inspired by some of my favorite blogs and news outlets, most notably The Verge — but I think it looks nice and reads well, which is the point.

Typography is all from Hoefler&Co.:

License

The natural-language content of this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

The code samples presented on this site are made available, without warranty, for personal or non-commercial educational use only, unless otherwise noted in the context of their presentation or unless specific written permission has been provided by me.

Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to use any of this content under other terms.