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Developer. Designer. Diviner?

In captivity I design and engineer with and without AI interference; in the wild I birdwatch, acclimate & exercise shelter dogs, cruise bikes, dink pickleballs, and compile songs.

Seen Birds

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  • Scissor-tailed Flycatcher

    Tyrannus forficatus

    Last seen
    July 28, 2026
    Mitchell Lake Audubon Center (HOTE 103)
  • Black-chinned Hummingbird

    Archilochus alexandri

    Last seen
    July 28, 2026
    Mitchell Lake Audubon Center (HOTE 103)
  • Egyptian Goose

    Alopochen aegyptiaca

    Last seen
    July 28, 2026
    Mitchell Lake Audubon Center (HOTE 103)
  • Brown Booby

    Sula leucogaster

    Last seen
    June 20, 2026
    Anita B. Gorman Discovery Center
  • Bobolink

    Dolichonyx oryzivorus

    Last seen
    June 19, 2026
    Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center
  • Grasshopper Sparrow

    Ammodramus savannarum

    Last seen
    June 20, 2026
    Loess Bluffs NWR
  • Bell's Vireo

    Vireo bellii

    Last seen
    June 19, 2026
    Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center
  • Swainson's Hawk

    Buteo swainsoni

    Last seen
    June 17, 2026
    Crescent Lake NWR
  • Ring-necked Pheasant

    Phasianus colchicus

    Last seen
    June 17, 2026
    Crescent Lake NWR
  • Green-tailed Towhee

    Pipilo chlorurus

    Last seen
    June 15, 2026
    Blacktail Butte Summit Trail
  • Western Warbling Vireo

    Vireo swainsoni

    Last seen
    June 15, 2026
    Blacktail Butte Summit Trail
  • Black-headed Grosbeak

    Pheucticus melanocephalus

    Last seen
    June 15, 2026
    Grand Teton NP--Blacktail Ponds Overlook
  • Broad-tailed Hummingbird

    Selasphorus platycercus

    Last seen
    June 15, 2026
    Grand Teton NP--Blacktail Ponds Overlook
  • Calliope Hummingbird

    Selasphorus calliope

    Last seen
    June 15, 2026
    Grand Teton NP--Blacktail Ponds Overlook
  • Barrow's Goldeneye

    Bucephala islandica

    Last seen
    June 15, 2026
    Grand Teton NP--Blacktail Ponds Overlook
  • Bullock's Oriole

    Icterus bullockii

    Last seen
    June 14, 2026
    South Park Wildlife Habitat Management Area
  • Mountain Chickadee

    Poecile gambeli

    Last seen
    June 14, 2026
    South Park Wildlife Habitat Management Area
  • Willow Flycatcher

    Empidonax traillii

    Last seen
    June 19, 2026
    Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center
  • Western Wood-Pewee

    Contopus sordidulus

    Last seen
    June 14, 2026
    South Park Wildlife Habitat Management Area
  • Common Merganser

    Mergus merganser

    Last seen
    June 14, 2026
    South Park Wildlife Habitat Management Area
  • Red-naped Sapsucker

    Sphyrapicus nuchalis

    Last seen
    June 15, 2026
    Grand Teton NP--Blacktail Ponds Overlook
  • Yellow-headed Blackbird

    Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus

    Last seen
    June 17, 2026
    Crescent Lake NWR
  • Cliff Swallow

    Petrochelidon pyrrhonota

    Last seen
    June 13, 2026
    Red Rock Lakes NWR--Lower
  • Franklin's Gull

    Leucophaeus pipixcan

    Last seen
    June 13, 2026
    Red Rock Lakes NWR--Lower

Design engineer in Kansas City

Ken Jones

Ken Jones outdoors in a striped shirt, in front of a teal mural

I’m a designer and engineer (design engineer) based in Kansas City. Design engineer? In practice it means I take both the design and the code a little too seriously, down to how a button answers your hover, how a page moves as you scroll it, and how much of the network waterfall sits between you and the first thing worth looking at. I’ve been building websites for over fifteen years, and this is what that turned into. Full website and landing page designs, frontend builds, and a lot of headless CMS work, mostly Sanity. I got good at it and spent enough time helping people in the community that Sanity hired me to do it. I’m also a Sanity Certified Developer, which is the paperwork version of that last sentence.

Before Sanity I co-founded an agency and ran it for seven years, leading creative and engineering. We were a lean team that built entire websites. The frontend always, the backend when it was needed, and the part nobody lists on a website, which is sitting with a client until you understand what they’re actually trying to do, then teaching them how to run it once it’s live. These days that client has often already built half of it with Claude Code or Codex, and the job is knowing what to ask for next.

Away from the screen I’m a mostly chill birder. The ticker up top is a list of my most recent A birding term for the first time I’ve seen a new species., and I will occasionally rearrange my entire morning upon receiving a notification that a rare bird has been spotted nearby (yes, I get rare bird notifications). The other thing that gets my attention is shelter dogs. I volunteer, I foster, and I take “Dog Day Outs” with nervous pups who need a better writeup than “I’m shy.” Otherwise I make electronic music, play a lot of pickleball, and keep a house full of plants that are, against reasonable odds, mostly still alive.

What I Do

I never wanted to pick between design and engineering. For a long time that read as indecision, and I got told more than once to specialize. As I gained more experience, this “The edge effect is the ecological principle that the richest, most diverse life appears where two habitats meet, and that’s where I work: at the boundary of design and web engineering, where I can see and build things that specialists on either side tend to miss.” really started to become what made me a unique asset to teams and companies.

Design

I’ve been designing and building websites for over fifteen years: landing pages built to convert, full marketing sites, and web apps with real product complexity behind them. I’m an engineer as well, so I know what can and can’t be built, and I design with that in mind from the first frame. Responsive layouts, interaction states, and motion are settled before development starts. Underneath it is the system: font faces, colors, components, and the rules that keep a product looking like one product.

Frontend

Svelte/SvelteKit (my personal favorite), React/Next.js, Vue/Nuxt, or Astro. Frameworks are like car makes: the controls move around, but the driving mostly stays the same. What I care about is how the site feels, for two groups of people. For visitors: real content on screen fast, with nothing in the waterfall holding it up; hovers that tell you what’s clickable; pages that move well as you scroll; and layouts that hold up on a phone and without a mouse. For the people who maintain it: a preview that shows the actual page, click-to-edit straight from the site, and changes that can’t quietly break the layout.

Content architecture

I specialize in Sanity (I’m a Sanity Certified Developer), but I’m happy to bring my CMS expertise to other CMSes. The main goals are modeling content so it survives the next redesign and building the editing side so nobody has to paste the same thing in four places or wonder which field takes the site down. Also baking in AI automations and workflows to reduce time to production while ensuring proper safeguards. Agents should be able to make content changes with the same brand guidelines, tone of voice, and safeguards.

AI build rescue

You built it with Claude Code or Codex and it works, sort of. The CSS is fighting itself, it’s slow to load, the experience changes from page to page, and every fix breeds two more. I’ve done design and frontend for a long time, and I build with these agents daily. I can see what’s off and fix it properly, then set up the rules, context, and skills in your repo so what you build next comes out right.

Technical direction

Which stack, which platform, what to skip for now, and what to do with the choices someone already made. Before a build, mid-build, or three years into one.

My Experience

Most recently, three years inside Sanity.io, where my job was helping spread knowledge to ensure success on the platform. Half of that was teaching; the other half was building tools, templates, starter kits, and libraries, so nobody had to begin from an empty folder.

Before that, seven years at AllDay.io, the agency a friend and I started, designing, building, and maintaining websites for people whose businesses relied on them.

Sanity.io
2023–2026

I joined as a Solutions Engineer, helping enterprise teams work out whether Sanity fit and then how to implement it right. Later I moved to developer education, building the starter kits, templates, examples, and docs developers learned the platform from.

AllDay
2015–2023

Frontend engineer, UI/UX designer, co-founder, more about AllDay

A small web agency I co-founded with a friend

A two-person web agency I started with a friend: he ran sales and strategy, and I led design and engineering. Sites businesses ran on, built on a well-structured CMS so editing pages and launching new ones didn’t need a developer on hand.

Thoughts & Learnings

Say hello

Whether that’s a project, a role, a thing you built with an AI that’s gotten away from you, or a question about something on here. I answer everything.