Earlier this year, I was involved in building the marketing website of Maybe, the open source personal finance and wealth management app.
While browsing Twitter/X, I came across a tweet from Josh Pigford teasing the design of the landing page. Having followed the project from its inception, I offered to do this; at the time, he wasn't even asking. This was quite ballsy of me; the designs were very detailed, and this would be my most visible work yet!
So I was softly-entrusted to do this — you know, with Maybe, no one is actually assigned to do work because it's open source, and they wanted to move fast — and this work continued for about 7-8 weeks with a lot of revisions and feedback.
What made it challenging were the details that were embedded in the design, and the sheer size of the work. Also, this was a major project! At a time, Maybe was trending for weeks in the Ruby repositories on GitHub!, and this would be their first full marketing website. So to speed up the work, I had to employ some generative agents. This was the first time I was actually paying for a model to write code, just because I needed to move fast and wouldn't necessarily have the time to write all the classes and html tags.
What also helped was my design background which led me to ask certain questions a non-designer wouldn't usually ask.
While this was challenging, I enjoyed building every bit of it. I've been involved in open source work for about a decade, and this was one of the proudest moments for me. They enjoyed the output of the work as well.