Kevin Lynagh

I’m a designer specializing in user interfaces for complex systems.

Keming Labs is my consulting firm, with clients in renewable energy, weather forecasting, futures trading, and synthetic biology.

What Kevin is doing now

I’m currently working on:

A robotic track saw using lighthouse positioning for sub-mm precision
Satisfyingly tactile input devices (knobs, switches, sliders, etc.)
Finda, a recognition-based, information-dense computer interface to end the tyranny of GUI windows, tabs, and useless hierarchy

Last updated: 2020 February 2.

I love collaborating, so check out my list of open ideas.

Popular work

I once made a cell phone out of resistors, capacitors, walnut, and leather.
Finda is a super-fast, super-opinionated desktop search app.
Subform was a UI design tool I built with Ryan Lucas and 1,000 Kickstarter friends. See my “Choosing features” talk for how how we applied conceptual design to build an accessible layout engine.

See also 20+ other talks on data visualization and programming.

Computering projects

Reltron, a prototype relational database GUI (2018 August–2018 November)
Stop Slacking, an email interface to Slack (2018 May)
Sketch.systems, a playground for designing system behavior (2018 April–2018 July)
Finda, switch to anything in under 16 milliseconds (2018 January–present)
Subform, a digital UI design tool and layout engine (2015 June–2018 June)
Moneyhawk, a personal finance tracker (2017 January–2017 October)
Denizen, a user management service (2014 August–2015 June)
Difftron, an image-diffing integration testing tool (2014 June–2014 October)
Variance, grammar of graphics HTML data visualization (2014 April–2015 December)
Weathertron, another iOS weather app (2013 June–present)
The DevOp, guides/software for computering hygiene (2013 March–present)
Weather Table, an iOS weather app (2012 December–2013 June)
C2, a ClojureScript data visualization library (2012 March–2016 March)
Kindle Games, developing for the black and white Kindle (2012)
See my Github homepage for a comprehensive list of my open source work

Woodworking / Architecture projects

A side table, OSB furniture (2019 November)
Building a CNC enclosure, 40 dB of happier machining (2019 September)
A Fusion 360 chair, first impressions on Autodesk’s hobbyist CAD (2019 March)
Looking at a Volvo, thoughts on a $50k station wagon (2017 October)
Stool-a-thon, a month-long celebration of stools + using up scrap lumber (2017 July)
Workshop, designing and building a workshop (2016 July–2017 April)
LSL cabinet, exposed framing meets in-wall storage (2016 May)
Laser-cut tetrominoes, an excuse to learn SolidWorks (2015 January–2015 February)
Phonetron, an artisinal walnut + leather cell phone (2014 July–2015 May)

Miscellaneous notes

Financial plan on retirement / financial planning (2020 January)
Lighthouse positioning rough notes on analog circuit design (2019 December)
Augmented reality + CAD + CNC rough notes on computer vision and machining (2019 October)
Pricing niche products: Why sell a mechanical keyboard kit for $1,668? (2019 August)
Travel / nomadic living tips (2019 March)
Performance of Rust’s match vs. lookup tables (2019 January)
On “Real-time search of all bacterial and viral genomic data” (2019 January)
On publishing emails (2018 December)
On fast ClojureScript React templates (2018 November)
A shipping puzzle (2018 October)
- part 2, with Rust
- part 3, with MiniZinc
- a reader writes in with many more MiniZinc solutions
On presenting relational data in tables (2018 August)
Writing a 7000-character regex (2018 June)
Practicing code interviews (2018 June)
Subform export (2018 January)
On direct manipulation (2018 March)
Subform command architecture (2017 October)
Statechart update (2017 October)

Please get in touch!

I love to hear from people, especially if I can help with their projects or careers! Please email me if you:

are interested in collaborating (check out my list of open ideas)
want more details about any of my projects (tech implementation, business strategy, etc.)
would like an introduction to someone (e.g. visualization/statistics, functional programming, or software design experts; investors in those domains)
want feedback on something you’re making

If you think it’s weird to email people you don’t know — it’s not! Some of the best relationships I have, business and personal, started when one of us reached out to the other for help on a project, thoughts on a problem, or just coffee! So, if you’re considering emailing, please do it!

For best results, see Patrick McKenzie’s tips for emailing busy people.