Maggie Appleton Portfolio
Staff Research Engineer at GitHub Next
Staff Research Engineer at GitHub Next and former Founding Product Designer at Elicit — a digital garden that splits four years of work into Essays, Notes, Patterns, and a Library, with every single item visibly timestamped by age ("Over 3 Years Ago") instead of a buried publish date.
Location
London, UK
Companies
Skills
Notable
- Co-created Just JavaScript, an interactive book teaching JavaScript mental models, with Dan Abramov of the React core team
- Founding Product Designer at Elicit, an AI research-assistant product she describes scaling past 200,000 active users
- Conference speaker at React Advanced (London), React Live (Amsterdam), Web Directions (Sydney), FFConf (Brighton), and Smashing Conference (Freiburg)
What makes it work
A breakdown of the choices that make this portfolio stand out.
Content split by epistemic status, not by format
The homepage doesn't use a single blog feed. It runs four parallel sections — Essays ("Opinionated, longform narrative writing with an agenda"), Notes ("Loose, unopinionated notes on things I don't entirely understand yet"), Patterns ("Design patterns gathered from my own observations and research"), and Library ("Books I've read and books I like the idea of having read") — each with its own one-line mandate. That's a real editorial system, not a label applied after the fact.
Every post is timestamped by decay, not by date
Instead of "March 2022," every essay, note, and pattern card is stamped "About 1 Year Ago," "Almost 4 Years Ago," "Over 3 Years Ago." This is a small but deliberate honesty device: a visitor immediately knows how stale a given idea might be without doing date math, and it implicitly pressures the author to revisit or caveat old claims (the essay list runs 2022-2025, the Patterns list runs 2021-2023).
A dated, resume-grade "About" timeline instead of a logo wall
The About page lists five roles as discrete cards with exact month/year ranges: Staff Research Engineer at GitHub Next (Oct 2025-Present), Lead Design Engineer at Normally (Jul 2024-Jan 2025), Founding Product Designer at Elicit (Jun 2022-Jun 2024), Head of Design at HASH (Oct 2021-Jul 2022), and Illustrator/Art Director/UX Designer at Egghead (Apr 2016-Sep 2021), each with a two-sentence description of the actual work. It reads as a verifiable CV embedded in a personal site, not a vague "worked at some AI companies" bio.
A "Now" page used as a running, dated career log
The /now page is not a static snapshot — it's a reverse-chronological log stretching from September 2020 to August 2026, with a fresh entry roughly every few months, each one naming the specific job change, project, or life event happening at that time (leaving Elicit in 2024, Normally shutting down in January 2025, starting at GitHub Next in October 2025). That cadence is itself evidence the site is actively maintained by a real, currently-employed person, not an abandoned artifact from a past job search.
What Product Designers can take from this
Specific, actionable tips to apply to your own portfolio — no generic advice.
Split your writing into an explicit taxonomy by intent (opinionated essays vs. loose working notes vs. reusable patterns) rather than one undifferentiated blog feed — it makes years of accumulated writing navigable instead of an infinite scroll.
Stamp posts with a relative "how long ago" label instead of only a fixed date. It surfaces staleness at a glance and creates gentle pressure to revisit or caveat old opinions before someone else calls them out.
If you've changed jobs multiple times, list them as a dated timeline with month/year ranges and a two-sentence description of the actual work, not a static "I've worked at X, Y, Z" sentence — it reads as a verifiable CV rather than a claim.
Keep a living "Now" or changelog page and actually update it every few months. A sporadically-updated personal log is one of the few portfolio elements that can't be faked by a one-time portfolio sprint — the update history is the credibility signal.
If you think in reusable design or interaction patterns, name and date them individually (as their own artifact type) instead of folding them into general blog posts — it demonstrates structural thinking about design, not just finished outputs.
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