Kevin Lynagh

I’m a designer specializing in user interfaces for complex systems, with clients in renewable energy, weather forecasting, futures trading, and synthetic biology.

See my email newsletter for the latest projects, etc. (There’s also an RSS feed.)

Recent issues:

What Kevin is doing now

I’m in Amsterdam, exploring:

reuse/abstraction in computer aided design tools
digital fabrication techniques for furniture-making
slip casting with 3d-printed molds

Last updated: 2025 May 26.

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 to end the tyranny of GUI windows, tabs, and useless hierarchy
Subform was a UI design tool I built with Ryan Lucas and 1,000 Kickstarter friends. See my “Choosing features” talk for how we applied conceptual design to build an accessible layout engine.

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

Computering projects

A relational spreadsheet (2022 December)
CADtron, a pen-based 2D CAD tool (2022 February–2022 April)
Pinfigurator language, microcontrollers meet SMT (2021 September–2021 December)
Pinfigurator, a microcontroller search tool (2021 June)
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–2025 May)
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

Building a floating castle / standing desk (2024 March)
Notes from a year of building keyboards (2020 March–2021 February)
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)
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

Towards the cutest neural network (2025 April)
Making electronic calipers (2024 November)
Generating Simpson’s Paradox with Z3 (2024 August)
Taiwan recommendations (2024 January)
How to get £520 from a canceled flight (2023 November)
Organizing windows, MacOS workflow and dreams of graduating PARC (2022 November)
PCB stepper motors / mm-scale x/y motion platform (2021 December)
A $35 spin-coater; SLA printing tips (2021 November)
Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig (2021 March)
Can I work via remote desktop? rough notes (2020 July–2021 June)
Building a touchpad (2020 June)
Financial plan retirement finances for self-employed Americans (2020, updated 2022)
Lighthouse positioning rough notes on analog circuit design (2019 December)
Augmented reality + CAD + CNC 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)
Looking at a Volvo, thoughts on a $50k station wagon (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.