"If I were to design..." A collection of living design documents

I often enjoy the design of new projects more than the implementation: there’s a certain amount of satisfaction to be taken from starting with a rough idea, defining the relevant requirements, and then making drawings with felt-tip pens on graph paper. Suffice to say, I’m the kind of weirdo who has always enjoyed whiteboarding assessments in interviews.

That’s why I’ve began sharing the design documents to a lot of my ideas, largely because I do a better job at actually designing systems than getting around to building them! These documents are written on notion.so for easy access and to enable quick amendments.

Not only are these documents quite fun to produce, but they have the advantage of preventing scope creep - and allowing a place to document any ideas that may be nice in the future, but would constitute scope creep during the initial phases. They’re also a great way of gaining - and documenting - exposure to new problems and learning associated tips and tricks along the way. Hopefully they’ll be interesting - or even useful! - to others.

You can view these documents on Notion - Living Design Docs . At the moment there are entries for an algorithmic trading service, and a deployable machine learning model.