Derek Wood Technical Product Designer / Advocate

Hi, I'm Derek.

I learned to build for the web by digging through Stack Overflow threads, documentation, blog posts, and whatever else I could find. Sometimes I'd lose days, even weeks, trying to understand something, finally get it working, and realize... wait, that's it?

That happened enough times that I got really interested in why some explanations work and others don't. I probably learned as much from trying to understand and answer other people's questions as I did from asking my own. The back and forth is where you tease out what someone's actually stuck on.

Eventually that turned into mentoring, then workshops, and eventually Perpetual Education, the design and programming school I built and ran for seven years. I've now worked closely with hundreds of designers and developers at every level — interviewing them, teaching them, watching them work, helping them through problems, and seeing where the tools or the explanations get in their way.

I love it. That moment when somebody's mental model changes and the thing that seemed impossible suddenly feels obvious? That's fun. The way we learn isn't by being shown the answer. It's about setting up the situation where the learning can actually happen.

I'm always learning new things and exploring whatever's next (lately, that's been deep in AI workflows), and I do it as a working product designer and developer. So whether the job is writing docs, interviewing users, designing an example project, making a tutorial, kicking the tires on a new product, doing some weird R&D, running a workshop, or figuring out why everybody keeps getting stuck on the same feature: I'm here for it.

I don't really think of advocacy as explaining features, and it's not a one-way relationship. If I'm hearing the same question twenty times, or watching people invent the same workaround, or somebody uses the product in a way we never expected, I want to know why. I want to learn the thing with people: find the weird edges, explore the options, prototype and test, and bring everything we learn back to the people building it.

I can talk to the designer, the developer, the CEO, the person who's completely new, the experts, and the team building the product. I want all of them to understand each other a little better.

That sounds like a pretty great job to me.

Thanks for reading.

Derek Thomas Wood