Real innovation isn't abundant options,
it's the discipline to do more with less.
Case studies from across my career at the intersection of design and engineering: design systems and theming at the core, plus the products, experiments, and even game design that shaped how I work. Each tells the story of the challenge, the constraints, the decisions, and what came of them.
11 projects
A remote Model Context Protocol server that gathers my thoughts, projects, and writing in one place, so when people ask an AI to 'behave like Donnie' the answer comes from my actual content, almost like asking me directly without scheduling time with me.
A design systems technique that curbs token bloat: instead of minting a new token for every expressive change, it rewires existing semantic tokens within a scope, re-pointing a style value at a generic UI concept inside a boxed part of the experience.
A personal design system playground for proving the longer-term, less-obvious ideas on their own merits, the ones real projects rarely have room to try.
An educational reference site that helps designers and developers build resilient, responsive layouts by working with the browser's layout engine instead of imposing a print-style grid.
Lead UXCore, GoDaddy's React design system: replaced statically generated palettes with CSS Custom Properties theming and a semantic Intent token system that themes across 20M+ customers, and rebuilt the component library in place toward composable primitives.
Built and grew Compass's design system from a prototype component library into a cross-organizational resource, owned the CSS across Compass.com, and pushed the platform forward with early CSS Grid, a Storybook-to-Sketch pipeline, and web component / React interop.
A minimal PWA for New York City transit: save a subway line to your device, grant location once, and see the next trains in both directions at your nearest station in real time, with almost no tapping.
A passive weather notification service that sends RSS feed updates only when the weather changes significantly from the previous day.
Hired as Itemize's first frontend engineer, then handed design too: I owned UX and frontend across the product, rebuilding the web app, improving the internal data-entry and analysis tools, helping build a team payment system, and reworking the marketing site.
A tournament management platform that automated bracket progression and competitor notifications via SMS to reduce manual coordination at gaming events.
Authored roughly 70% of the step charts for In The Groove, the DDR-style rhythm game, across its PC release and arcade-bound sequel, focusing on the demanding doubles charts.