2024
Hi, I’m Callum Flack. I’m a frontend engineer (12 years experience) with a background in branding, graphic and UI design (10+ years).
From vision to details and back again, my job is to build beautiful hypertext interfaces that work in the blink of an eye, creating the most valued currency—trust.
When a persons trusts your UI, they’ll interact with it to run the functions that create the service value they’ve hired you for. I write those functions too.
When design meets infrastructure like this, people call it design engineering. I enjoy the challenge of not just delivering code but making the experience at hand sing.
Career highlights include:
Here’s my CV. Please read my case studies here.
As a frontend engineer, I’m fluid with React and Typescript, and I’ve used Vue and Svelte in the past. My go-to frameworks are Next, Remix and TanStack Start. HTML and CSS are givens. I use tools like TanStack Query and Server Components to bridge the network and database layers. I’m particularly interested in LLMs, design systems and real-time, local-first sync systems.
My background is design and it informs everything I do. I started my career in branding and graphic design in 1999 and have been designing user interfaces (UI) since 2008. When applied to creating for the internet, I consider all these facets crucial to designing the user’s experience (UX).
These days I spend most of my time in code but I still love the chance to spend a sprint in design mode. Some people now call this mix of skills a “design engineer” or “user experience engineer”. Either way, I’m competent as a designer or engineer and I love making design real in code.
The value of good design is only realised if you have an engineer capable of discerning the details in code (or if you’re lucky, they’re one and the same). Jim Nielsen
A decade as graphic designer and a decade as frontend engineer gives me unique agency: I use code as a design tool to get as close as possible to the nitty gritty of the medium. Being able to design and code simply creates a much faster feedback loop.
Neither code nor design is the point. Materialising ideas is. As such, I think there is no substitute for the journey of forming personal taste by paying attention to the world and making ideas real.
Knowing the tempo of work is underrated. Are we testing a hypothesis? Running downhill towards a feature release? Nailing a customer experience flow? I keep a tempo in mind at all times.
Lastly, I believe that teamwork scenius is secret in plain sight. Shared intuitions and mutual at-handedness grease the wheels for speed as well as tuning orientations. As such, I work with people first. Good ideas and working systems naturally follow.
I collect music of all kinds and used to run multiple vinyl record labels with friends between 2007 and 2013, for which I designed (or rebuilt) all the record covers.
I read books and watch films voraciously; Gerald Murnane’s “Border Districts” or Jonathon Glazer’s “Under The Skin” are current favourites. My favourite artist is either Agnes Martin or Joseph Cornell.
I’ve lived in 3 countries and 8 cities. Home is now tropical Cairns, Australia with my wife and children.