Dissolving the line between design and engineering - Julius Tarng (Dive Club S6 | E4)

Julius Tarng is the ultimate generalist designer.
- He started the design tools team at Facebook where he made a massive impact on products like Origami.
- He then freelanced as a design engineer for companies like Felt, Anthropic, and even prototyped some of the early AI features for the Arc browser.
- Now he’s in his first-ever engineering role at Linear.
So this conversation is a deep dive into what it looks like for designers to approach their work with an engineering mindset. We talk about Julius’s deep background in prototyping, how he collaborates with designers at Linear. And we also get into why the current state of design engineering is a missed opportunity. If you’re looking to grow as a software designer then you’ll love this episode.
Show notes:
- Julius’s twitter - x.com/tarngerine
- Felt - felt.com/ (a better way to work with maps)
- Daniel Smith - / daniel-smith-6a0a201a (Linear designer that Julius pairs with)
- Origami - origami.design/ (Facebook’s prototyping tool)
- Brandon Walkin - x.com/bwalkin?lang=en (ex: Facebook, Apple, now at OpenAI) who made the adaptive pointer for iPad.
- What are GPUs and Shaders? - • 🧠 💻 A designer explain... (Julius’s tutorial video)
Partners:
Framer: How I build websites (join.dive.club/framer-ad-podcast)
Jitter: How I animate my designs (join.dive.club/jitter-ad-podcast)
Raycast: How I do everything on my computer (join.dive.club/raycast-ad-pod...)
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Chapters
0:00 Raycast
0:36 Intro
2:00 Julius's background in industrial
4:09 Freelancing as a design engineer
10:59 Why Julius joined Linear as an engineer
12:54 The origin of prototyping tools at Facebook
14:32 The blurring line between design and engineering
20:03 The benefits of having design and engineering in a single role
21:56 Why Julius thinks design engineering is a missed opportunity
32:31 Why Julius joined Linear as an engineer
36:42 How Julius collaborates with designers at Linear
43:15 How Julius has grown while at Linear
47:04 Why the future of designers will need to be "AI-native"
#productdesign #podcast #uiux

[@pype101]

Love this new transition of design merging into programming. The things people that know both are doing are amazing. It is going to be even more impressive with a few years of growth as an industry.

[@joindiveclub]

agreed!

[@alphafoxcreative1731]

The flashing rectangles during testing Figma prototype got me rolling on the floor 😂

[@axl8603]

We're working on such a tool you were lacking where designers can contribute to production. The way Julius talks about engineers reminds me of industrial designers... as they are traditionally in the same manner as architects.

[@joindiveclub]

Would love to check it out!

[@jameshskim]

This talk was truly inspiring and eye opening. Don’t have a technical background, but lately I’m drawn to be able to BUILD your vision instead of just having it mocked up in Figma. But the developer world is quite overwhelming for me, git, npm packages, different programming languages, etc. Really have no idea how to traverse this space to ensure that at the end I’ll have the ability to build the idea that I want.

[@joindiveclub]

agree it's way more complex than it needs to be. on a mission to help lower this bar for people. more to come!

[@imadtaieberrahmani9221]

Check tools like Replit, it's an IDE on the cloud. No setup is needed there

[@ShayneCuffy]

Oh boy, I need to do a round 2 on this to begin unpack it’s value. Brilliant discussion 🤯

[@joindiveclub]

I did a round 2 myself 😅

[@irvro]

maaan this design + code series are being so much inspiring to me! the last 2 years I've been working on a company that without me knowing to code, started to assign me front end tasks, I struggled so much with the technical side like git, branch, npm, commit, but now I see how much useful It was to understand more about the implementation side and actually gave me some hints about how to bring those concepts to the design side on Figma. since then I've keep learning more about how to bring my UI to life. thanks a lot for this material!

[@joindiveclub]

LOVE it 🙌 Definitely have a few more queued up that I think you'll like :)

[@kawabus]

Curious if the engineer test used leetcode examples

[@gautham1641]

I'm one of these guys. Its hard for me to meet other like minded people or find jobs in this area. My tutors that code usually make things for fun, they stick to figma and Arduino for fun. I'm in classes integrating APIs and making stuff that could rly be useful. I love the product thinking behind it but these different titles try to pigeonhole me. Hopefully after my postgrad studies I'll fit in somewhere.

[@multimicah]

cannot wait to tune in and listen to this. 💿🔊🦾

[@AshishYadav-dq7ne]

You are awesome !