Just submitted my final presentation, complete with imagery, a theme revolving around trust, examples of the work I made, and more. It’s a shame it’s not so easy to show all the work I put into my time with Liz but from a relations standpoint she’s been ecstatic about the quality of my work and has praised it well, and ultimately that’s what I set out to achieve. I’ve left a link to the presentation itself here for future reference. I still have a couple of working days to make final adjustments to the site. It’ been a challenging yet fruitful endeavor, and I am grateful for Professor Goetz and Liz’s input, feedback and support throughout this semester.
One of the self-directed learning moments that stuck with me this semester came from an episode of The WAN Show that discussed the fallout surrounding Eufy and their mishandling of consumer data. The situation centered around how recklessly the company handled sensitive user information, including unsecured access to user data and even live feeds from home security cameras. What stood out wasn’t just the technical failure, but how avoidable much of it was.
The discussion highlighted a breakdown of trust on multiple levels. On one end, consumers trusted Eufy with some of the most sensitive data imaginable—inside their homes. On the other end, the company failed to treat that responsibility with the seriousness it demanded. What made the situation worse was that these weren’t edge-case exploits or sophisticated hacks; much of the exposure came down to careless implementation and poor safeguards. The result was a total erosion of trust, and ultimately, the collapse of the company’s credibility.
What made this especially impactful was that The WAN Show chose to drop Eufy as a sponsor on principle. That decision reinforced something I’ve been thinking about a lot during my internship: trust is the most valuable currency in the economy. Once it’s gone, no amount of marketing or damage control can fully restore it. In this case, the loss of trust wasn’t abstract. It had real financial and reputational consequences that the company never recovered from.
This episode also reinforced why I’m so focused on technological privacy in my own work. Whether it’s my personal portfolio site or blyegrassjamsnearme.com, I make a conscious effort to collect as little data as possible. If information doesn’t need to be stored, it shouldn’t be. The more data you collect, the more responsibility you take on, and that responsibility extends far beyond just “keeping things working.” It’s about safeguarding people, their habits, and in some cases, their personal spaces.
As a designer working closely with technology, this feels especially relevant. Design decisions aren’t neutral. Choices about data collection, defaults, permissions, and transparency directly affect users, even if those effects aren’t immediately visible. The Eufy situation is a clear example of what happens when those responsibilities are treated as an afterthought.
What I took away from this episode is that trust isn’t something you can retrofit after the fact. It has to be built intentionally, protected consistently, and respected at every level of a product’s design and implementation. Seeing a major platform publicly cut ties with a sponsor over ethical concerns made it clear that these values aren’t just theoretical. They actively shape the industry. It’s a reminder that doing less, collecting less, and being clear with users isn’t a limitation, but a professional and ethical choice.
Another ethical dimension of this internship has been the amount of trust involved in how my time is structured. Most days, Liz and I can only meet for the first 30 minutes to an hour. Once she’s confident I have enough to work on, I’m largely left to my own devices for the rest of the day. That setup requires trust, and it’s made me much more aware of how I communicate progress and account for my time.
Early on, we talked about the nature of the work, especially the more coding-heavy parts of the site. We both understood that this kind of work isn’t always linear. You can spend hours debugging or reading documentation and still have very little that’s visually obvious at the end of the day. While she understood that reality, she also made the fair point that I couldn’t spend an entire day coding and have nothing tangible to show for it.
My counterargument was that being incentivized to show the highest volume of visible output isn’t really an industry metric in tech. In many cases, less, well-structured code is far more valuable than a larger amount of messy or redundant code. Spaghetti code might look productive in the short term, but it creates problems down the line. What matters more is clarity, maintainability, and intent.
The compromise we reached was a balanced approach. I would spend part of the day on visible, design-forward tasks—things like banners, layouts, and cleaning up messy sections of the site—and the other part on less visible but essential work, like improving UX/UI flows, reading documentation, and adding clear comments and notes so future contributors can understand what’s happening without me being there.
This balance has helped maintain accountability without undervaluing invisible labor. It’s also allowed for more difficult, thoughtful, and ultimately more unique work to happen alongside the day-to-day deliverables. What I’ve taken from this is that ethical work environments don’t just reward output—they make room for quality, complexity, and trust, which is where the most meaningful work tends to come from.
One of the more important lessons I’ve taken from this internship has been about time, and how respecting it is an ethical issue as much as a practical one.
Early on, Liz and I acknowledged that her office is far from where I live, so it made more sense to meet primarily over Zoom rather than force in-person meetings that would eat into working hours. More importantly, we established clear expectations from the start: I would work from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM every Tuesday and Thursday, excluding holidays. That schedule wasn’t treated as flexible or implied—it was the framework we both agreed to from the beginning.
Outside of those hours, we’ve been careful not to blur the line between work and personal time. With one warranted exception, neither of us has made a direct attempt to reach out beyond our working window. Instead, we email each other notes or questions to be addressed during the next session, rather than expecting immediate responses. That distinction has helped us stay organized without creating pressure or confusion.
This boundary has made the working relationship more professional and more sustainable. In creative and internship environments, there’s often an unspoken expectation to always be available, especially for interns.
DitherBoy is my second app review. DitherBoy is a pay-once tool by Studio AAA that allows designers to apply various dithering effects to images and some videos to give them that bit-crushed, old school retro look. It seems easy on the surface to intentionally reduce the quality of an image but to do so with style is a whole other affair. Because a lot of my work in design plays with black and white, I really wanted to stretch black and white to it’s limits for my senior project. Typically I do photography on black and white film, but sometimes found myself frustrated at how grey the overall image was. In trying to think of solutions to this, I thought to the old technology of my childhood and how it managed to make fully shaded images out of what is effectively a binary bitmap – A white or black pixel, in a grid, somehow displaying convincing shading using only 2 colors. The original GameBoy comes to mind (and I suspect is the inspiration for the name). The UI is refreshingly simple given that it has a single dedicated purpose. I found that it handled certain images better than others. Typically, a smaller, more compressed, higher contrast image would yield the best results. In my experimentation, I would certainly say DitherBoy alone is not very capable, but does speed up the process of creating Dither effects. Here’s a before and after for visual reference:
Ironically, the focus of this software being set out to achieve a singular objective made the UI really intuitive and exploration a lot less daunting. Comparing it to my experience learning blender, for example, the ease of which one could get lost in blender’s UI was a non-issue in DitherBoy. I had the handle of the controls within 10 minutes, it boils down to a couple of drop-down menus and a few sliders, and gives a nice variety of dithering effects to play with.
My only hiccup with DitherBoy is that it does not have a great implementation for handling videos as it struggles to keep up, and images larger than 2k resolution seem to bog it down quite a bit as well. I found this out as it outright tells you it won’t run great beyond a certain resolution, and most of the images I get developed are typically at least 5000 pixels wide, so I typically preprocess every photo first, which is an issue no other software I can think of faces. Still, if you have the 50 or so dollars to give this a try, and so long as you know what you’re signing up for, it’s a pretty good deal for a lifetime license. It also includes lifetime updates, which appeals to my aversion for unnecessary subscriptions.
My chosen app for this review is Obsidian. Obsidian is an open source note-taking app with a lot of cool features. I started my academic journey on OneNote, but fragmentation in versions, features, and general enshitification eventually pushed me away elsewhere. I was recommended Notion by a fellow student, and I loved using the free version at first, but at the beginning of this very semester, Notion had paywalled Google Drive integration, after years of it being free. Something about them timing their paywall to put students in a panic and put pressure on them to pay for their premium membership rubbed me the wrong way, and shook my trust in them enough to search for alternatives.
I went with Obsidian for 3 main reasons as a result. It’s open-source, meaning that their aim is to be a quality, community-built tool and not a for-profit product (their only means of monetization is the option to pay them for cloud storage, and they still offer alternatives like google drive for free. This will never change). The second is the vault system they use, where the everything is saved in standard postmark languages like HTML and json files in a standard folder structure (and browsable as such). The third reason is the community-made extension support, which made things like integrating my To-Do list with my Google Calendar, which runs my life, a lot easier than it was with notion.
This doesn’t make it perfect, however. Some of the problems I encountered migrating my notes include:
Notion’s difficult and limited export options. This made migrated notes strange when handed off to Obsidian, although this is entirely Notion’s fault afaik
The graph view (as seen in the photo attached to this post) makes for a super sick visual of all the connections between notes based on keywords and relationships to other notes, complete with custom filters and rules and whatnot. But beyond looking cool and pretty, it doesn’t really have any solid functionality for such a prominent feature of the app.
Vaults can be slow. I believe this to be because there’s no compression going on, and therefore your notes are literally raw files being handed off as is. Could also be Google Drive’s fault, as I use my Google Drive to keep media files synced across all my devices.
Except for my phone, lol. For whatever reason, the Mobile Apps don’t support Google Drive, even though Google Drive is a mounted storage device on android, so it should be treating it as a usable drive, and it does everywhere else, except for the Obsidian Android App. There are workarounds, but they re a hassle and I’ve yet to get it to work.
Overall, given that it’s free and the only opportunity lost is time, I would recommend anyone looking for a cool, permanently-free note-taking app a shot so long as the issues described aren’t dealbreakers.
I had recently found out about the Society of the Scared Pixel, a smaller scale networking event hosted via zoom for anyone interested in joining a discussion about design. Every week, on Sundays at 4PM, it is hosted by a new, actively practicing designer, who bring their own unique blend of insights. I thought this to be a nice contrast to my first networking event, which was conversely a multi-million dollar production hosted by the biggest megacorp in the design software realm. This weeks host was Nickolette Phillips, a designer specializing in Virtual Fashion, which from my understanding is the equivalent of a fashion-focused cloth sim, that extends beyond just 3D modelling and mockups. The event was much more intimate than Adobe MAX, and I found myself preferring that setting as it made for less of a “guided tour” like experience, and more of a “book club” environment. Nickolette had a lot of interesting ideas particularly pertaining to the evolution of fashion design, and how current technology, unlike the consumer market, has actually made the creation of physical design much easier than it has ever been. She attributed it primarily to the ability to ideate quickly, efficiently and precisely without ever having to have spent a dime on fabrics or the skill and precisions that an experimental seamstress would have to already possess. There was even an attendee who shared similar interests to my own and made a comment on how 3D printing as an industry has also taken off in a massive way primarily for it’s accessibility in allowing more and more people to ideate within the confines of physics and their imagination. I plan on attending at least a couple more times, as 3 attendances to their regularly-scheduled Sunday meetings actually enables you to request a portfolio-review session, which I think is a really clever way to retain people, and build community quickly. It helps negate that gap between the otherwise abstract idea of “industry” and brings it back to your work instead.
Got a lot of work done. Still working on technical elements of the site, such as social media integrations and less interesting technical tweaks and automations, but this has also been the most design-heavy week thus far. I’ve been working site wide to create things like contact forms, a searchable resources page with external links, embeds to relevant podcast episodes that Liz has worked on, a lot of UX usability additions, like a popup that explains how searching for jams works, and much more. I’ve really appreciated having more sustained contact with Liz as she’s in an interesting predicament where she’s trying to promote her own bluegrass jams, while also having the site be broadly agnostic of her own personal jams, while still highlighting her own events. We’ve had many discussions about where “Liz” ends and “BlueGrassJamsNearMe.com” begins, as the line is not always clear even to her, and we are finding the path as we go along. This leads me to my new inclusion of a page listed in the header of the site called “Liz and Ron” (in reference to her jam partner). It contains a little introduction to their relationship to the site, as well as a list of their upcoming jams (denominated by the category “Hosted by Liz”) and a little bio for both Liz and Ron, complete with videos of previous jams for credibility’s sake as people who are experienced in jamming.
Got a lot of features implemented this week that I thought would be tricky to achieve and I’m quite happy about it. I got the account system working for visitors and contributors, a system that holds new events pending review of the admin, a new landing page, a featured events section, a way for users to submit events, an RSVP system (that still needs work), and many insightful discussions with Liz. I appreciate her willingness to “discuss” as opposed to “decide”. For example, with the layout of this new WIP home page, we discussed the hierarchy of things, she suggested maybe having the option to list a jam being as important as finding one, to which I rebutted that most will find this site first in search of a jam, as opposed to a way to host one, discussed monetization strategies. Another example was how to handle the free songbook download for the site in an automated fashion. My suggestion was to have a user require a login to get it (as the objective is to collect emails for her newsletter), whereas she said she didn’t want to clutter up the userbase on the site with people who showed up for a pdf, in effect, so we settled on a login-agnostic form that collects your name, email and zip code instead, and then takes you to the pdf on confirmation. Still much to work on, next week I’d like to figure out the “featured event” category and how that plays out on the homepage, how to emphasize the events, podcasts and resources that she’s already produced to new users, etc…
This week, I attended Adobe’s MAX event. While I was honestly underwhelmed with the AI-based iterations they made to their creative suite, the actual workshops (which of course, also found a way to shove in discussion about FireFly AI) were really engaging, and gave me a surprising amount of insight for the sheer scope of people who use the Adobe creative suite. As for the internship itself, I’ve made some great progress with Liz thus far. I am quite grateful to have such a wide range of problems to solve with designing the bluegrassjamsnearme.com site, as it’s been putting almost all my strengths to use; coding, web design, UX/UI, Logo design, among others. I have practically transformed the site in most functional ways. It went from initially being effectively a standard WordPress site, with a blog-like UX that involved just looking at a list on arrival, to a functional, geolocating map that finds the nearest events to the user, and actually lives up to the name of the site. There are still many challenges, of course, like making it all user friendly so Liz doesn’t have to learn PHP just to make changes to the site, and getting the Google Maps API to cooperate, but otherwise, I’m quite hopeful about getting the site feature-complete before the end of my internship
