Meet the Team: Luke

To give you a little insight into the team behind zeroheight, we’re going to start a monthly post to introduce you to the team one by one. To start with, I thought I’d make it easy and turn the microphone onto myself.

What do you do at zeroheight?

As well as being the editor-in-chief of the zeroheight blog, I head up the Community & Content team at zeroheight (as well as doing a bit of design advocacy myself). We’re responsible for all of the good zeroheight content you get in the world, from the podcast to social media to the newsletter, as well as being active members of places like Triangles and Design System Slack. I come from the world of product design before zeroheight, and the world of developer evangelism before that, so have seen a lot of the problems that zeroheight are trying to solve first hand!

What’s on your desk?

1. I’d like to say that the mic on the boom arm is mostly for podcasts, but to be honest it’s mostly for sounding like a radio DJ on work calls. For the mic I rock an sE X1A, which is an absolute workhorse of a microphone. It’s plugged into a Behringer UMC404HD, which sits underneath my computer and makes me feel like an audio engineer.
2. One of the most recent additions, is my little maneki-neko (partially hidden behind the microphone here). I’ve become marginally obsessed with Japanese culture over the last two years, so this is just another thing that makes me happy and maybe brings a little bit of luck.
3. I never realised how bad the macbook camera was until I was on video calls most of the day, so I got myself a Logitech Brio camera to not look so blurry and pixelated.
4. One of the most useless, but pretty, purchases is this little humidifier off instagram. I think I turned it on once. Don’t buy things off instagram, kids.
5. Sitting in my home office all day means I get to blast whatever terrible music I’m listening to at the moment (it’s between new-wave grunge, J-pop and Australian hip-hop at the moment). Another lockdown purchase was levelling up my speakers with some Mackie CR4-X monitors.
6. Yes, that’s a ring light. No, I am not a nineteen year old TikTok star.
7. My rotating wall of things I like looking at. It’s great to have somewhere I can put illustrations I’m proud of, things my friends have made and random stuff I pick up along the way. Current favourites are my big Fightmilk pennant and my little Droplets by Gavin Strange.
8. Another lockdown purchase to kill time, and while it was a great 3 hours putting it together, I’m pretty sure half of those water Lego studs are hiding in my carpet and surrounding drawers…
9. Because why wouldn’t you have a megaphone on your desk?

What excites you most about the future of designops?

For me, it’s about solving the thorny problems to do with designer to developer handoff, and seeing how much of that we can automate. DevOps has come so far with their governance processes, automation, testing and CI, and I think there’s a lot we can learn from that in the design space. I feel like Tokens are a great first step in the process, and I can’t wait to see what comes next to make everyone’s lives a little easier!

What album, book and luxury item would you take if you were marooned on a desert island?

Having asked a lot of guests this question over the last six months on the podcast, I think I have my answers down pat now. For the album, it’s pretty easy. Los Campesinos!’ Sick Scenes is one of the best albums to come out of the last twenty years, and I’d love to alternate between belting out the words and picking apart Gareth’s lyrics. For the book, I’m a sucker for bittersweet modern love stories, so I’d take Normal People and re-read it for the hundredth time. For the luxury item, I’d be boring and take my iPad and Pencil loaded up with Procreate so I can spend the time doodling stupid things and making up imaginary gig posters.