Jesse Gardner

Hi BlueSky! I’m building a design system and accessibility team for New York State. Give me a follow if you want to talk more about creating usable interfaces at scale in the government space. 👋🏻

The problem with any digital media consumption machine is that it preys on our capacity for enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a discipline, a habit of attention, curiosity, and investment that must be formed. The simulacrum we settle for has put us almost entirely out of practice at finding the real thing.

New York has a design system. designsystem.ny.gov

Every confusing city website and dead-end government portal makes New Yorkers trust their leaders less and less. It's time for City government to enter the 21st century.

I'm speaking at the 2026 Code for America Summit on May 7-8! I’ll talk about building out the NYS Design System over the last year. I'm especially excited to talk about how a well-built design system is infrastructure for AI. If you'll be in Chicago, say hi! 👋 #CfASummit #designsystems #civictech

Will you be at @codeforamerica.org Summit 2025? Let's meet up! I'll be in D.C. May 28-30 and looking forward to networking with others in #civictech. Excited to talk about the #accessibility and #designsystem work our team is doing at New York State!

Nearly 1 in 4 New Yorkers live with a disability. Visible or invisible, lifelong or temporary — it’s something that will eventually affect everyone. Excited to be part of building a Central Accessibility Team at New York State. Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day! #gaad #accessibility #a11y

God grant me the serenity To grieve what I cannot ignore, The courage to fight off ICE agents When the come for my neighbors, And the wisdom to know that Silence is complicity.

Lucky enough to spend time exploring NYC with this girl. Enjoying every moment! 💕

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people: 18f.org

When your wife and kids sneak into your ChatGPT account.

Our group has been hard at work to release a new tool: The Data Rescue Tracker. The tool aims to provide a consolidated overview of who is downloading which dataset from which government websites. Please share! www.datarescueproject.org/data-rescue-...

The Constitution is not a self-correcting document. It’s a legal framework with checks and balances that only works if enough people collectively demand it to.

File analysis tool to detect non-inclusive language in your source code.

here lies Jesse Gardner who vowed never to shilly-shally but could not resist a good dilly-dally

Here's a quick piece I wrote up on how to understand DOGE as a very blatant attempt at procurement capture, a simple way of making government spending corrupt to benefit the tycoons. Please do pass it along & share any feedback! www.anildash.com/2025/01/04/D... (Thx for the nudge to write it!)

First day on the slopes. Merry Christmas Eve! 🎄

Having just gone through a big token naming effort, I can tell you it can be challenging. I’ve had a small peek into their recommendations, and can tell you it’s chock-full of good practical ideas.

Spent the day proctoring exams for a Science Olympiad competition.

Imagine if @figma.com had a wrapped

Good morning, friends!

It amazes me how much of a drug mindless entertainment can be. I don’t need to face difficult things, I can just lose myself to the endless stream of sensible chuckles until sleep takes me.

Trying to remind myself of Epicurus’ words: “The wise person’s misfortune is better than the fool’s prosperity.”

Our team is building out a design system for NYS, and one of the hardest tasks has been developing a library of design tokens that are semantically rich, understandable, themeable, and useful across platforms. Naming really is one of the two hardest things in computer science.

I know people who voted for Trump who told me that can’t imagine him shutting down the DoE. “He doesn’t have the power to do that, does he?” This bill was introduced last Thursday: www.rounds.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

One thing I find interesting about the echo chamber complaint is that an echo chamber just won a presidential election. Put aside the convo of whether it’s “good” or “bad” for a moment. The far right has devoted enormous resources + time to building echo chambers & loathes spaces they don’t control

If I were a talented musician, I’d write a song about the brevity of life, and record a verse in each phase of my my life, and have it played at my funeral.

“The company is a future adversary” is a fantastic insight for anyone building a platform. How will you protect users from bad incentives that will crop up over time?

Never forget alt text again: 1. Settings 2. Accessibility 3. Require alt text before posting

“What if I’m wrong?” It’s one of the hardest questions to ask yourself, especially since the answer takes the hard work of expanding your perspective. But every meaningful change in my life started with me asking that and being open to the answer. Growth can’t happen without discomfort.

What gif pops up when you type in your name?

My good word for the week comes from Jennifer Hecht: “We do not have much time to observe the universe before we die.”

TIL that low-frequency tinnitus is a thing. And here I thought it was a far away trains passing by.

Age yourself with your first computer.

They had me at #rebeccapurple.

A coin flip at the start of your life: Heads: You are a supremely honest and fair person your entire life, yet everyone around you considers you a scoundrel. Tails: You cheat and lie when it suits your needs, yet everyone around you thinks you’re a paragon of virtue. Which would you choose?

The thing that really differentiates Bluesky is that it doesn’t feel like it was designed by a bunch of people who will lose their jobs if I spend a little less time on Bluesky.

🎵 "It's not a heavy load to open up your code and write the WCAG." 👇🏻 This a11y song is a banger: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IWB...

We’re building out the component library for NYS’s new design system using Lit and web components. AMA

Carbon therapy.

“Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what my current life looks like.” Not bad… though I’d never be able to grow a beard like that.

Today would have been Carl Sagan's 90th birthday. He wrote this in 1995. Carl was absolutely right. #CarlSaganDay

“It’s not the right wing media it’s the economy” “It’s not the economy it’s the right wing media” Hey guess what it’s both of those things and also a massive constellation of other things including individual circumstances for each person

onward

the ticking time bomb of whoops i took nyquil but forgot I have an important email I need to write tonight