1. There’s nothing quite like having a conversation, coming up with an idea, teaming up with an engineer (or writing some code), and then seeing it used by people the very next day. The very next day. I love that. A few examples from the last months: Sasha Lubomirsky wrote about a research-driven feature we collaborated on, and I’m particularly proud of a little “TK” feature I put in our editor.

2. I’m surrounded by inspiring, talented, open-minded, and communicative people. I love collaborating with them, and — selfishly — I love how much I’m getting out of it. Our hilarious engineers help me to be precise, think through edge cases, and make my designs buildable and maintainable. Our product science team teaches me about how to find and understand data so that I can use it to make my decisions. Our PMs teach me to be inclusive and razor sharp with my focus. And, last but hella not least, everybody on the design team teaches me something every single day — colour palettes, icon design, accessibility, empathy for our users, new trends and old habits, how to use tools and when not to use tools, and unknown-to-me ways of looking at problems and solving them.

3. We have an internal version of Medium called Hatch that we use for a lot of our internal communication. It’s so good it feels like a perk. It forces us to be thoughtful about our product and about our company. It makes everyone a better writer/explainer/storyteller. It keeps the relevant ideas and thoughts afloat, as they don’t just die in individual mailboxes. One of my favourite things after joining Medium was going through Hatch posts of Ev Williams and all the designers. (We occasionally share some of Hatch stories in a publication called Inside Medium. Check it out!)

4. I get many reminders that what I’m working on matters. That we’re building a vast space for meaningful inspiration, safe idea sharing, and thoughtful discourse. That every design decision and code change I make is multiplied by millions of words that’ll run through it. Those words might shape another powerful article about something difficult to talk about. Something that starts a movement. An important message from an important person. Or just a deeply insightful piece masquerading as a long joke

5. The design team keeps messing around with ways to gather feedback and grow together as a whole. I wrote about one, Tactical Design Critique, but we employ — and invent, and remix — many more. We do early explorations together. Or solve specific problems. Or run through creative exercises. Or have an occasional thoughtful debate (my last one: why the world needs zero emoji). We try to elevate candor, curb design by committee, and we aspire to be good at giving useful, actionable feedback on early crazy stuff one minute… and ready-to-be-locked-in-place-retina-pixels the next one.

6. We get to experiment. We build things in various levels of completion to confirm or deny a hunch… or validate the next rung in our long-term strategy. We share — often via Hatch — lessons from the things that don’t make it outside of our labs (although we’re still learning how to do this effectively).

7. Once in a while, Ev Williams comes over and we chat about type, or editing, or design. Those are great moments; Ev’s gut feelings and his ideas, sharpened by years spent at Blogger and Twitter, are worth paying attention to. But then, Ev leaves me to deal with them just like I do with all the other feedback, rather than pushing it on top of the pile it just because he’s the CEO. This is wonderful: You own your stuff and are trusted to do what needs to be done, and figure out how best apply your time and talents.

8.I’ve had freedom to create some cool tools: Slimer (an iOS app for seamless filing of bugs), Fontificator (the “Bloomberg Terminal for fonts”) and an occasional bookmarklet or two. I’m pretty proud of those and it’s fun seeing them in use.

9. I learned much more in my two years at Medium than ever before in my career. I inhaled tons of wisdom about shipping product and prioritization. I became a better engineer (shout out to Nick Santos for teaching me about unit tests), writer, and presenter. Right now, I’m working hard to be a feminist, and a good team lead. And I know there are so many doors ready for me to open — project management, data science, front-end engineering — and people supportive of me opening them. (The biggest challenge is not to open all of them at once. Sometimes, to be honest, I feel as distracted as ever.)

10. Speaking of doors, we work in an awesome office. The design team even took over some of it to be… a space dedicated to typography. (And, I swear the occasional false fire alarm is a nice bonding moment for the entire company.)

11. I occasionally get to do things I wouldn’t dream of ever doing. I still remember the late evening working on preparing photos for Barack Obama’s Medium account. I recently bumped into Natalie Portman in our offices (“I loved you in The Phantom Menace!”). And, a few weeks later, I got to nerd out with Ev on stage about typography at our 2.0 launch event, backed by the biggest slide-deck I ever designed. Seriously, those two-storey slides were pretty epic.

12. For the first time in my career, I feel very close to people using what I’m building, and their feedback: through user testing, individual emails + tweets from Medium readers and writers, and — first and foremost — our intrepid and inventive User Happiness team, which deals with all the incoming feedback and shares it further discriminately and with style. (Not to mention a lot of great designers use Medium!)

13. The secret chocolate drawer is a life-saver. (But shhhhh… you didn’t hear it from me.)

14. We are as deliberate about designing the company as we are about designing the product. We went on meditation and storytelling retreats (ask me about my Chernobyl story!). We often have candid conversations, across the board, about tough issues. And it’s always fun to laugh during our Friday company-wide presentations.

15. We’re barely done with the product challenges. Seriously, we’re really only half a percent on our way there. There’s still so many meaty problems to tackle:

• How do we balance self-expression and consistency?
• How do our typography approach, UI, and general notion of Medium translate to different cultures?
• How do we grow Medium without it losing its soul?
• How do we make it even easier for people to express themselves? For writers to write more and better? For readers to read more… and better as well? For our users to understand the immense power of everything in between reading and writing (highlighting, quoting, responding) that doesn’t exist anywhere else? For our creators to make money?

16. We’re small enough so that one person can still make a huge mark. It took me more than a year, but — with great help from others — I learned enough to enable better typography for half a continent. And, even more importantly, I’ve seen people deciding they want to become world-class experts in something to make the product (or the company) better… and that happening in front of my eyes. Our Android app, for example, started with Daniel McCartney… just venturing out to build one. It’s great to be around when that happens.

17. We take time to do things that are important. One of my favourite moments this year was collaborating with Jamie Talbot and Sarah Agudo on building support for licenses — an important project allowing writers on Medium to better express their relationship with their content, but one that also made me grow as a designer.

18. I like what we do, and I like how we do it. We make room for big thinking, and we make room for craft. I still remember when Daryl Koopersmith inspired me to work on perfect underlines. I since got much better at minutiae of typography… but also at higher level thinking about what typography means to us and our users.