About

I was here for most of it

I learned to type on a keyboard before I learned to drive. The dial-up handshake is one of the sounds I still recognize before I'm fully awake. AOL and Prodigy. The first time the web felt inevitable. Web 2.0. Video streaming. Social media. The first smartphone that actually worked. Now AI is being woven into more or less everything, and the air pressure has changed in a way that's harder to name than the last few times.

I'm not writing about this from the outside. I lived every wave of it from a screen, and I'm watching this one with the same combination of recognition and disorientation that the previous ones produced before we figured them out.

The through-line

For fifteen years my professional life has been at one specific seam: the boundary between human beings and the systems they're supposed to use.

Personas for an enterprise platform that served thousands of different jobs and one shared interface. Information architecture for a financial product whose internal model didn't match the way its users actually thought. A design system modernization that had to make a decade of legacy patterns feel like a single language. A new conceptual domain definition for one of the most stressful workflows in finance: the close. Different shapes of the same problem. Each time, the question was: how do you make a complicated system feel more human to the person on the other side of it?

That's not a portfolio thread. It's a posture. AI is just the latest, most consequential system to land on that seam, and the one most worth thinking about out loud.

What this site is for

bradbonham.com is for people who remember what life felt like before everything accelerated, and who want to come forward without losing what they remember.

It's not a portfolio. It's not a newsletter funnel. It's a personal publishing site and a working lab for useful experiments, written with empathy for the disorientation, with a longer view earned by having been here for the whole arc, and with a methodology that treats AI as a tool for making things more human, not less.

The recurring move across the work, across articles and lab entries and whatever else accumulates, is turning messy human context into useful artifacts. Voice notes into writing. Ideas into prompts and templates. Research into frameworks. Frameworks into things you can actually use. The site is itself a demonstration of that move.

How I write here

Editorial north star: use AI boldly, stay human on purpose.

Every published piece is labeled with one of three authorship tiers (fully authored, AI-assisted, or AI-synthesized from voice) because transparency is part of the brand. Don't hide the process; demonstrate it. Most pieces use the Gruber Blurb format: a short personal blurb in my voice at the top, then a structured body. Some pieces are voice essays in their entirety. Lab entries document the experiments themselves: what was built, how, and what it shows.

The recurring editorial lens is Retro Future / Future Retro: the deliberate move of reaching back to retrieve values, practices, or aesthetics worth carrying forward. Not nostalgia. Source material.

Get in touch

If something here lands, I'd like to know. If something is wrong, I'd like to know that too.

For now, the best public way to reach me is through GitHub.