The sourdough

I am a design engineer at Red Hat, working on Podman Desktop and leading the design system refresh. My days are mostly spent improving UI components, nitpicking about accessibility, helping our engineers with UI issues, writing skills for Claude Code, and sometimes drawing icons and logos.

When that is over for the day, I work on my retro WebGPU render engine, Blit-Tech. It's written in TypeScript, with help from the same pipeline I use at work – Claude, CodeRabbit. Different domain, same tools. And it’s fun, which is what I need.

The illustration at the top is another one of my hobbies. I used to be an illustrator and actually made a living at it for many years. That’s why I started to hate my style. I exactly knew what the client wanted to see, and I never tried anything. I always did the “right” thing and moved to the other job. These days, my style isn’t super polished, and that’s why I love doing that. The broken lines and misalignments help me get away from the always-perfect deliveries I’m expected to make. I can’t draw commercial stuff anymore.

When I go out, it’s always with my camera. And then, when my brain is fried, I develop these photos. Check them out on vancura.photos or Glass. Photography is great: I can make photos full of right angles, leading lines, symmetry, as if I was still designing. Well, I can’t help myself, see?

And, there’s writing. I’ve been in the industry for long enough to see it all. I started when the ZX Spectrum was young, and I am still here. I saw things people wouldn’t believe, and I think some of the stories are rather fun. Here to write about them.

I also made a game you can play today: Laserboy. Play it on Steam or itch.io, it’s free and fun. It won’t take you long to finish, and you’ll understand who I am – and who I made it with (hi Alex and Ant).

The backstory

I used to do many things, but the highlight, most probably, was Xamarin, where I designed user interfaces and endless lists of icons until the Microsoft acquisition. Then I became a design lead for Visual Studio for Mac and did the same, but in a management role. After that, I worked in a small game studio, Universal Entities.

This blog

This is where I show-and-tell interesting things I know or have been part of. Here I think out loud. It will be direct, personal, and not regular. No pressure, there’s enough of it around.

It will be about user interface design, design engineering, AI, developer tools, game development, and all things related. There will most probably be more than what I listed above.

Here it starts. Let me bake this.