About D. James Poer

I build things. Sometimes they're software. Sometimes they're guitars. Sometimes they're ideas that probably seemed simpler when I started.

I'm D. James Poer, a Senior UX Engineer and Front-End Architect who has spent most of my career somewhere in the overlap between design, engineering, accessibility, and product thinking.

I've never been particularly interested in the line between “designer” and “developer.” I care about whether the thing makes sense to the person using it, whether it works for people who use it differently than I do, and whether the code underneath it is something the next developer can actually live with.

That has taken me from hand-building guitars to building enterprise applications, modernizing legacy interfaces, designing workflows, untangling CSS disasters, teaching accessibility, working with distributed engineering teams, and occasionally asking the uncomfortable question everyone else has learned not to ask:

Why are we doing it this way?

I like complicated problems—especially the ones that aren't really solved by adding another framework or drawing another mockup. The interesting work usually happens where people, technology, business requirements, and reality collide.

This site is part portfolio and part working laboratory. I built it from the ground up in Angular, and I'm deliberately showing more than the polished results. You'll find finished work, experiments, decisions, mistakes, revisions, and some things that are still under construction.

Because that's a much better representation of how I actually work.

I design. I build. I break things. I figure out why. Then I make them better.