Evan Wallace (the author) is also the co-founder and CTO of Figma. Absolutely remarkable engineer. His co-founder Dylan is an investor in our company, and I can’t seem to get in touch with Evan at all because he’s always super heads down on something meaningful (such as esbuild). Mad respect for him.
I know about his story with Figma, and AFAIK he managed to push it forward through the Thiel Fellowship (which I've considered myself too).
Honestly as I've mentioned in the post I've been quite excited about the product (specially when I managed to make the MVP useful enough to replace AE for simple GIFs, I even use the tool for that purpose) and my initial plan was definitely to make this happen, but I haven't really seen a solid way to go about it full-time without taking a huge risk, specially at my age.
He totally is just some random guy. I know this, because I worked with him for a few years in Amazon Fulfillment. Just found out today that it was him that made this project (haven't talked to him in a while).
Met Nathan when he was cofounder of a student entrepreneur group at Michigan State. He also never mentions designing the first version of Product Hunt for his friend Ryan Hoover as a weekend project so I can't resist calling attention to it here.
Nathan's current startup is Lex.page where I believe he is reinventing an AI powered version of the word processor.
Love those guys. As a junior designer, their work are very inspiring. I also love medium. I've found great deal of content on startups and building stuff. Didn't know they worked together on Medium. Great find.
I'm loving Ed Catmull's book Creativity Inc at the moment, but I do tend to forget he is PhD in Computer Science who invented texture mapping. The articles are really over my head too.
It is worth noting that Catmull attributes their original publish everything attitude (against an industry standard for trade secrets) as formative in acquiring the talent and industry came early on.
He was one of the best rated SEM guys on Elance. His name is Josh May, I believe. I contacted him later for another project, but he was no longer taking on new work.
I have kept in contact with both of them a tiny bit (through twitter, blogging, etc); both Bran and Miguel are very talented people and I consider them some of the top in the field of voxel engines -- Ken Silverman as well.
Does anyone know if the author has written or presented on his workflow as he goes from idea, to concept, to rough draft, to finished product? I'd really love to learn how he goes about it... Pixel Factory was so dense and clear thinking, beautiful, intuitive. Wow.
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