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Brandon Dail

@brandondail.com
5K followers 404 following 141 posts

Staff Engineer at Discord working on Design Systems, Accessibility, Other Stuff™️ Collage & generative plotter artist 👋

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 01/07/2026
It's a shame that generative image models have pursued realism so relentlessly. Reproducing training data is uninteresting and exploitative. The imperfections of early models were genuinely interesting, and will end up being the most artistically interesting artifact of all this in the long term
an image of a beach generated with the low-quality misua-diffusion-one model, which is trained exclusively on public domain/copyright free images
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 23/06/2026
I’m on sabbatical this month, and I’ve been using some of my time to dust off my plotter and get back into my art. This is a CMYK print that’s using a custom algorithm based on waves and circles to layer the colors. Stopped half way through because I liked the vibes ✨
A top-down shot of a 9x12 CMYK plotter print. The print features abstract blue, red, green, and pink colors with a sharp cut-off about 60% down, where there's no blue or green. The top half looks kind of like cactuses that are flowering, and the bottom half kind of looks like lemonade. The close-up shot of the CMK print showing the waves and circles composed together to make a green yellow pink abstract piece
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/04/2026
I appreciate that @github.com wants to give me recognition for all this work, but I'd be reticent to take credit for all 21 million open pull requests
Screenshot of github.com/pulls/authored that says I have 21 million open pull requests and 147 million closed ones. You can see a couple PRs that are clearly not the users'
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 18/03/2026
There are two main startup tasks for @discord.com: 1. Fetch and run all the JavaScript 2. Open a socket and get your data from the gateway Those were happening sequentially; now they are parallel! This improved P50 TTI by like 12%, over a second for many folks 📉 discord.com/blog/discord...
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/01/2026
Here's your friendly reminder that CSS selectors are global and evaluated RTL, so if you have selectors that are very broad like `.container > div` you might be impacting performance in a measurable way 🙈 Before and after profile of server switching after some selector optimizations in @discord.com
Two screenshots from Chrome DevTools side-by-side. On the left it says "Before" and shows that rendering took 1518 milliseconds. On the right it says "After" and shows that rendering took 610 milliseconds.
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 15/04/2025
had a daughter the other day, we’re big fans ❤️
A newborn baby hand resting on top of a man’s middle finger, as if they were holding hands
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 26/03/2025
for example, text-secondary here is defined in terms of a contrast ratio with a background token. This defines the color across all themes; no hand picked colors! that bg token is also defined using a contrast constraint. If anything in the constraint dep graph changes, it propagates automatically
yaml code that reads:

# text-secondary.yaml
type: text
constraints:
  scale: neutral
  contrast: 6
  with: background-surface-highest
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 11/02/2025
angry guy with amnesia:
Life magazine cover with a photo of Jesus Christ that says JESUS, who do you say that I am?”
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 10/02/2025
$500 pack of cards casually sitting on the shelf 🫣
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 09/02/2025
long overdue, but I did it 🫡
screenshot of x.com showing the @aweary account; the page says "This account doesn't exist"
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/12/2024
`ps aux | grep rg` showed that rg was being called with a pattern looking for tailwind config files
screenshot of ps aux | grep rg showing a ripgrep/big/rg command running with a tailwind.config file splat
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/12/2024
opening our monorepo's VSCode workspace was totally killing my CPU with rg processes. It brought my M3 Max to a halt for like five minutes. Turns out it was the Tailwind extension I had installed for another project trying to find a tailwind.config.* file in our monorepo 🫠
screenshot of macOS' Activity Monitor showing a list of rg processes. At the bottom a CPU load graph shows near full utilization and the system CPU usage is reported at 94.44% utilization
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/12/2024
can you guess what my favorite album was this year
An Apple Music interface showing a 'Top Songs' list with 1,993 total songs. The top 5 most played songs are all by Adrianne Lenker, each accompanied by the same profile photo of someone wearing a white cowboy hat. The songs, in order of plays, are: 1. 'Fool' (50 plays), 2. 'Sadness As a...' (47 plays), 3. 'No Machine' (42 plays), 4. 'Free Treasure' (29 plays), and 5. 'Vampire Empire' (25 plays). The interface has a dark green background, and there's a share button icon at the bottom of the screen
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/11/2024
Bluesky connections on Discord are live! 🦋
screenshot of Discord's connection list showing my bluesky account linked
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/11/2024
Working on our color system and a novel approach we've started exploring for colors is to define them in terms of constraints: instead of picking colors for every token/theme, you specify a reference color and contrast ratio. The system does the rest. this has a few cool advantages 👀
a large directed graph showing a web of dependencies between color tokens like background-base-low, text-primary, and many more.
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 23/11/2024
one day at Disney World 😪
screenshot of Apple Fitness showing 17422 steps, 7.71 miles, 2 flights climbed
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 14/11/2024
I wrote an internal command to run this plugin on a single module awhile back to debug this kind of stuff. Here's the output with and without that assignment. Looks like when it generates that __closure value it doesn't know withSpring isn't reachable.
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 08/11/2024
recently sewed a plushie based on a drawing my 5yo made as a birthday present for one of his close friends 🪡
A child's drawing of an orange monster with spiky features and legs drawn in purple ink sits next to a handmade plush toy that is based on the drawing. The plush toy is orange with white eyes, a black mouth with felt teeth, and navy blue legs or tentacles at the bottom. Both items are photographed on a wooden surface with visible grain patterns.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/11/2024
I get a lot of extra bottom spacing when looking at a post and its replies
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/11/2024
A bonus technical detail: this all works seamlessly with any number of tabs AND if you dynamically add or remove tabs. This almost never happens but it helps me sleep at night knowing that the system is resilient and it’s good signal we have the right state abstractions in place
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/11/2024
When you over scroll the content area the active indicator will “squish” against the edge in the direction you are over scrolling. This uses the same scaleX/translateX approach that the stretch effect uses.
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/11/2024
The active tab indicator syncs up with the tab content horizontal scroll position of the tab content area. The scroll area has snapping enabled and once you scroll past the snap threshold the active tab text color will apply to the tab that would be active if you stopped the scroll gesture.
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/11/2024
When you press down on a tab that isn’t selected, the active tab indicator will “stretch” towards that option. This is done with a scaleX transform that increases the indicator with, paired with a translateX transform that makes sure the scale transform doesn’t affect the position of the indicator
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/11/2024
A small thread on some of the small details we built into our mobile segmented control component at Discord. These are subtle details but I’m a strong believer that polish like this can make all the difference 🧵
Screenshot of the Discord segmented control component
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
translate being the top action in this menu feels wrong; it’s probably one of the least common actions I’d use here
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
if you need a distraction, here’s a gorilla body slamming its siblings at the Atlanta Zoo today
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
there’s also some layout jank on this edit profile screen where the header is outside the safe area as the banner image loads in
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
The header on this screen feels a lot larger than others? also standard layout for a view like this would include a back or cancel action in the header too
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
I’d give this jump button a *slightly* different color so it stands out a tad more without being distracting, and also align it with the avatar. Alignment feels off as is
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
whatever the double arrow icon in the bottom right of the image above is seems unnecessary, and the border radius feels wrong; should have a bit more spacing and larger radius
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
pull to refresh in notifications feels jank because it very briefly puts a loading spinner at the bottom of the list too (brief layout flash, took the screenshot here from a a screen recording)
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
looks like the spacing in the lists tab gets all messed up if I scroll down a bunch in another tab and then switch to lists
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
would love to see a gesture-driven animation on the tab selected state here. snapping feels more jarring
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024
🙋‍♂️ the swipe gesture to open the sidebar feels really finicky and the expanded state clipping at the safe area makes it feel less polished (compare: here vs. twitter)
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 06/02/2024
making my triumphant bsky return with some Pokemon card pics
Bulbasaur, Ivysaur, and Venusaur special illustration cards
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 16/06/2023
mixed media collage, integrating foil paper and my bespoke CMYK pen plotter prints
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 02/05/2023
Post your best Magna-Tile castle
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 01/05/2023
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 30/04/2023
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 30/04/2023
this is the most depression era snack I’ve ever seen. This is something grandma makes right before your dust bowl farm is repossessed
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 28/04/2023
me logging on in the morning to post relentlessly to rebuild my twitter clout
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/04/2023
every time I go through this drive thru taco place they hand me this thing to pay and walk away, this is too much responsibility I just want tacos
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 26/04/2023
Mixed media collage with generative CMYK plotter art ✨ June, 2022
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 26/04/2023
[me, out of breath after running to the front desk] hello I’m here about the free attention
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 26/04/2023
oh I guess this image is just broken? 😵‍💫 try again
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 25/04/2023
I saw Beau is Afraid last night and this description from Ari Aster is on point
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 24/04/2023
I think GitHub has one of the best theme settings out there. You can choose between a single theme or two themes that sync with your system theme. It doesn’t force you into selecting the “appropriate” kind of theme for each option either 🙏 Full control without being overwhelming.
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 24/04/2023
Cance l
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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 23/04/2023
Kicking off with some art! Seaside 🌊 mixed media collage with CMYK generative plotter art, 2023
a mixed media collage; a woman in a red sweater sitting in tall, brown grass at the edge of an oceanside cliff, the sky
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