Interviews/Dennis Brotzky

Overview

• Henry Heffernan
• Mariana Castilho
• Lochie Axon
• Dennis Brotzky

Brotzky is an engineer who loves design. He is also the co-founder of Fey, an app that helps you make better investments.

Emil (00:00)

Most people I guess know you from Twitter because you are in the design engineering-ish sort of category, I would say. But if you could tell a bit more about yourself and what you do right now, it would be great.

Dennis Brotzky (00:08)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah, I’m Dennis Brotzky, co-founder of Fey. I run the engineering side. have two other co-founders, Thiago Costa, who does the design side. And then Thomas Russell, who’s a bit of a ghost, but might be making a Twitter account soon. He runs the engineering, product, admin, everything. He’s kind of a beast in our secret sauce.

Emil (00:41)

Okay, so is it only you, Thiago and Thomas that is building Fey like full time? Because I knew the team was small, but I didn’t think it was this small.

Dennis Brotzky (00:52)

Yeah, I think that’s what people are most surprised about when they think of Fey. It seems like we have a big team running behind it, but it really is only us three. know, I know we’ve had some discussions with like other companies and other people, and then they hear us when we say we’re only three people, they always assume we’re like offshoring some sort of talent or we have some secret people. But honestly, it’s just the three of us and we work

really well together and we all work incredibly hard. Just like the last month in March, we’ve had to take out a data provider and we’re like, okay, this has to get done. It’s like a company changing event in terms of significance. So we just work all day. Right now we’re working weekends. We love what we do. So it’s not really an issue, but

We just work hard, get it done. And that’s it. That’s kind of the secret. It’s just us three.

Emil (01:59)

Is it just because you are working so well together and you don’t want to disrupt that? Or what’s the reason to not expand the team to five, six? It doesn’t have to get huge, but more people, I guess, more things get done to a certain point.

Dennis Brotzky (02:17)

To a certain extent. mean, when we started Fey, we actually had six people. And slowly over time, we’ve kind of shedded people. each time that happened, we moved faster and faster.

The beautiful thing of owning a company and having it your way is you can make the rules. Right now we’re having so much fun just working between the three of us. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with, like there’s certain people you work with in your career, in your job, and like you guys just work really well together and it’s so much fun. And you’re like, I can’t wait to build this thing with this person. Or it’s always like the first person that you go and get feedback from.

You run to them and you’re like, hey, look, look what I made. Do you have any feedback? Are you impressed? And like the three of us, we have that with each other and things are moving really well. And we just don’t want to, don’t want to ruin that. It’s just too much fun.

Emil (03:20)

But does that mean that because the team is so small, you also get to design a bit? Does Thiago get to like code a bit or are the roles pretty strict?

Dennis Brotzky (03:34)

they’re pretty strict. would say in the beginning, maybe I would be in Figma a bit more often and Thiago wouldn’t touch code at all. but more recently actually with AI and cursor and all the new technology around that Thiago is actually coding more than I’m designing. to be honest, I don’t do too much design or I just give Thiago some feedback and he just makes it look good. but

Dennis Brotzky (04:03)

We’ve gotten so good at what we do and figuring out who should do what, where it’s the most efficient thing is he does all the design. I do all the engineering. Tom as well does pretty much all the engineering and a bunch of other stuff. So over time, our roles have gotten more and more defined where it’s just most efficient for Thiago to work. And also Thiago is like the fastest designer, I think, in the world.

If I think there was like a design competition with Brett and maybe lovable or something like that. And they had a 45 minute time limit. I was like, Thiago, you got to go into this because like he can spit out a beautiful landing page in 30 minutes. It’s absolutely insane. and he’s never a blocker in the company. He’s always like, our designs are years ahead and our engineering is fast too. But,

Dennis Brotzky (05:04)

We’ve figured out the most efficient way to do it is having a bit more separate roles, which might not be very traditional nowadays where design engineers kind of are sitting in Figma. make the prototype, they do the engineering and they have like full control over that aspect. But I think because we’ve been working together so long, we’re almost like a single unit now and it works well.

Emil (05:34)

Yeah, I think many people think that design engineers design and code, I like when I worked at Vercel and the design engineering team was pretty big, like we rarely spent time in Figma as well. We may need to code and maybe the animation side was the motion part was a bit where we had more or we did more work than the designers, but we rarely designed in Figma as well so I don’t think it’s that rare.

Dennis Brotzky (06:04)

That’s yeah, that’s a very good point on the motion side. I think that me personally, I might have more say in the way it feels and it’s implemented. Thiago usually uses like a After Effects or just like Figma to roughly show or he’ll even just put still images in Figma of like, this is this beginning, middle, end. And then it’s very much up to me to make it feel good and make it smooth and make it possible in that sense.

Emil (06:42)

To go back a bit, how did you end up at Fey? What did you do prior to that? How did you become an engineer in the first place?

Dennis Brotzky (06:52)

Man...

Yeah. So I don’t have a traditional engineering background. didn’t do comp sci. I really didn’t touch a computer until I was, or I use a computer, but I didn’t code or do anything like that until maybe I was 21, which I think might be different than most people in the industry, especially if you were doing comp sci or engineering or something related in university. But I have a BA in psych, bachelor of arts.

and a minor in music technology. And there was one specific class in my fourth year of university where it was called music and the internet. And we had this kind of out there prof. It was a really small class of eight people. And it was supposed to just kind of be this, this fun course where I knew the prof, everyone’s having a good time. Uh, but randomly he showed us CSS and how to do a for loop in JavaScript.

It was just like the most random day in class. And he’s like, okay, guys, look at this website. And I remember vividly, he showed us a Coke bottle made in pure CSS on like some website. And he’s like, look how cool this is. And I was like, this doesn’t make any sense. Like what’s CSS, what’s so special about this Coke bottle? And he’s like, look, you can zoom in as far as you want. And like, it’s super crisp. It’s not an image.

And he kind of taught us the very basics of CSS and JavaScript. And then we had this one assignment where we had to make two websites for our favorite artist. So he’s like, pick your two favorite musicians and make them a website. We’re going to get 1 % bonus. And the class is going to vote on whose website is the best. So that was on a Monday. And I remember for the next week, I just dive.

dove so far into it where like my whole day was building this website. I remember the first time I dragged like indexed that HTML into my browser and I could see, oh wow, like this is how the internet works. It’s not like this huge black box. It’s just this file that you put into your browser. And there’s this stuff called HTML and there’s stuff called CSS. And if you want to make it interactive, you add JavaScript and uh,

I spent the entire week making these two awesome websites. And, in the end class voted mine was so much better than everyone. Like I was just in love with it. And this was my second last semester of university. And then I had like one more. So was like two halves of a year. And then I did comp sci one-on-one for my last kind of

course in university. And I remember it so bad. It was like all Java and I had no idea what was going on. I was in fourth year with a bunch of first year students that like already knew how to program and they’re doing all these assignments and I was just struggling so much and hating it to be honest. But I knew I was like, I have a BA in psych. And back then it was like,

I knew I wasn’t going to be a psychologist or something. And it’ll be very hard to find a job. And I decided, Hey, like web development, software engineering. It’s like very much in demand. So I kind of stuck through it, finished my comp sci one-on-one class just barely passed. And then I remember I got a part-time job working two days a week and it was awful. And I would spend all my other time reading books on JavaScript, making websites, recreating websites. I would like go to all my favorite websites and try and recreate them with HTML and CSS. And I like show all my friends and do all these things. And then eventually I was like, okay, I should make myself a portfolio website. And I spent so much time on it and I was so proud of it. And I sent it to a bunch of companies and then

first one I sent it to was Lightspeed, which is like a big Canadian company now, but at the time they were quite small. And the person interviewing me, he’s like, you’re very raw, but you look like you’re very passionate about this. And I can see like you just started a few months ago and you’re already doing like impressive stuff for that amount of time. So he hired me.

Dennis Brotzky (11:38)

And that really changed my life. Like that’s where I met Thiago. He was the designer at this company and we hit it off right away. Cause it was, I think the first time he worked with someone that was so excited about everything and like he would design something and I would be so hungry to like see his Photoshop files back then. And he had like exclusively sent it to me. Cause he knew if he sent it to me, I would like make it right away and I would make it exactly how he had it in his head.

And he was, and he’d never worked with someone like that. I think before all the engineers he worked with would kind of butcher everything and make it. Alignments were wrong. The colors were wrong. Interactions were wrong. And then I would always be pushing him. So he was like, give me a design. would be like, what if we did it like that? That would be even cooler. And we kind of just like kept spiraling in this thing. And that’s how I met Thiago and like we’ve been best friends ever since. But then I moved back to Vancouver, uh, from there and I had to leave Lightspeed and I went to go work for a startup in Vancouver in finance, which is kind of where Fague comes in a bit. Uh, was a startup essentially, I was the first front end engineer to join the company and help them grow. But I would always be in contact with Thiago and,

We’d always send messages, DMs being like, I don’t like how this is done at my company. I’m like, yeah, like the designer here isn’t very good. He’s like, the engineers here aren’t very good. And eventually we just said, it, let’s make our own thing. So we started a narrative with two other people, Mac and Thomas, who’s our other co-founder of Fain now. And that’s how it all kind of started.

Emil (13:34)

Is Lightspeed, this is kind of random but I’m not sure if I remember it correctly, is Lightspeed like an e-commerce brand or no?

Dennis Brotzky (13:40)

Yeah, it’s a point of sale system.

Yeah. So they do. I remember when I was at Lightspeed, our biggest, I wouldn’t say our biggest competitor, but we’d always look at Shopify. So Shopify back then was also pretty early. Another Canadian darling, the best tech company in Canada. And then Lightspeed also was in that bubble at that time.

Emil (13:42)

Right. But how did you start Fey or narrative like, and then Fey, did you like raise money or like how, cause I’m pretty sure it’s not like a VC backed company.

Dennis Brotzky (14:25)

The way narrative started was a bit of an interesting story where we were all working full-time jobs and we didn’t really have the cash in our savings to just like drop everything and risk it all on this new venture. So Thiago had the great idea of, he was very in demand back then, and I’m sure he would be now, but he would get recruiters talking to him all the time saying, Hey, you should come interview at this company. They’re very interested in your design skills.

And I was like, Hey, why don’t I go to these interviews? And instead of them hiring me, they can hire narrative. And that’s what he did. He kind of went through a few interviews and as soon as the first person was like, we’re going to actually hire narrative instead of Thiago to do this design work. I think we all quit our jobs. We’re like, okay, let’s do this. Let’s dive in.

We have our first contract. Let’s, let’s go for it. And that was, I don’t know if anyone knows Hopper. was a long time ago. We did hopper.com as our first client. And we just kept the ball rolling from there and there and there. And then from there, we always knew we wanted to start a product. We knew consulting, you kind of get this like never ending cycle of trying to find your next customer. You always have to.

There’s no recurring revenue to put it simply. And that’s when we made enough, excuse me, enough cash from narrative’s consultancy side to start pay.

Emil (16:06)

Do you now just work on Fey exclusively or do you do some contracting type of stuff sometimes as well?

Dennis Brotzky (16:12)

No, definitely not. 100%, seven days a week all the time. We wake up, think of how can we make fate even better? That’s all we do.

Emil (16:23)

Yeah, I think that’s also nicer about working on a product that you can... I feel like when you’re working for someone, you make something and then it ships and then that’s it. And with the product, you can keep thinking about how you can improve it and it’s a never-ending story and it just keeps getting better and better.

Dennis Brotzky (16:43)

Oh yeah, hundred percent, we have this internal joke every time we’re like, Oh yeah, phase complete now. And then we’re like, we’re not going to have anything to build after these one or two features. And then lo and behold, every single time the scope just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And we have more stuff to build and more stuff to build. So yeah, it never ends.

Emil (16:49)

What makes people... I at least when I browse Twitter I see sometimes a post, a random tweet about Fey like praising something about Fey. And of course you... I kind of have an assumption why that is but you build it with just you know to other people like why do you think people like Fey and not some other tool? What makes Fey special.

Dennis Brotzky (17:40)

I think in investing, it’s often overly complicated and very technical. I see it a bit like math. People are kind of afraid of it. And I think Fey is the best app in the world where it simplifies everything for you, making it like super easy to track your portfolio, do research and get all the analysis you need. And there aren’t many finance or I don’t think there are any finance tools that look and feel like Fey. Like it’s very approachable. It’s beautiful. Honestly, it looks very simple to most people, which is good. We do our very best to do that. And to be frank, two thirds of our team, like we don’t have finance backgrounds. We’re engineers, designers. Thomas has a finance background, but he’s like this weird amalgamation of finance, engineering and taste, which you don’t find too much in the finance world. And we really just build it for ourselves. Like we all invest, we all have ambitions to grow our investments. We want to have some cash growing. So we just build what we find useful and it seems to resonate with other people.

Emil (18:52)

Something that like I’m kind of interested in, you’ve been working at for on on Fey for a long time. Don’t you get, you see that the same app every day when you work on it, right? Don’t you get bored of it, tired of it at some point

Dennis Brotzky (19:26)

Yeah, but if you do, you can just change it.

That might be where being three people and kind of having full control over the product becomes a benefit where we launched Fade 2.0 January 1st, 2025, somewhere around there. And it’s completely different to the Fade that was before it. So it really feels fresh, at least in my mind, everything I work on. I think I also have the benefit of working with an amazing designer. So.

I am seeing what he’s building and like, I get hungry to implement it and make it a reality. And everything he’s doing is very exciting and beautiful, which makes my life even easier.

Emil (20:15)

How do you guys keep the app fresh? Do you just like perform the design and build things based on your own intuition or do you listen or get users feedback? Cause the team is pretty small. Usually, you know, companies have even whole teams to do like do interviews with customers and whatever. Like, is it mostly you guys?

and your intuition or how does building a feature or updating a feature at Fey look like?

Dennis Brotzky (20:45)

It’s a mixture of everything. I think the main driving factor is what we want to build for ourselves. I think if you’re building a product for yourself, you’re always going to find it very exciting because it’s what you want. But of course we get a ton of user feedback and we kind of have a high overview of what customers want. And we take that into account. It’s very important. We definitely listen to all our feedback, we have a feedback channel in our Slack, we have a ton of DMs with our customers where we’re always kind of bouncing off ideas. But ultimately, if we’re not excited about the feature, we’re not going to build it. It’s just going to be way too hard. It’s going to be like implementing something you’re not excited about is like the worst thing. And we do make sure.

Dennis Brotzky (21:44)

We work on stuff that’s Even like we’ll be bouncing around ideas and being like, like what’s the priority? Should we implement A or should we implement B or C? And then our answer is almost what’s, what makes you the most happy? Build that. And that’s kind of how we keep it fresh. If you’re excited to build the feature, you want it for yourself, you’re to go into the nitty gritty. You’re going to figure out all the details.

You’re going to make it fast. You’re going to make it beautiful. You’re going to make it useful. And it makes it much easier.

Emil (22:16)

Yeah, that’s true. When you are excited about something, then like you said, you go into the, to the, to the details and everything and it gets much better. yeah, that’s why, why I like, like building open source stuff as well. Cause I, I get to like, you know, come up with how, with everything and I only will build something if I’m excited about it because it’s my free time and I could be doing anything else. but yeah, but that’s, yeah.

Dennis Brotzky (22:48)

You could be doing anything. Exactly. That’s where the magic happens though. Like when you have that excitement, you have this idea and you kind of have like a vague idea of how to implement it. You’re not a hundred percent sure, but you can kind of see all the parts in your head and you just go for it. And that’s where our best features have been shipped. That’s how we stay happy. And that’s how we’ve been working on FACE so long.

Emil (23:16)

Yeah, I think you’re in a very unique position. know, the team being so small and you all having so much influence on the product and getting to work on the stuff you really enjoy.

Dennis Brotzky (23:24)

Yeah. And, and that’s exactly what can answer your question of why our team is only three people. Because you only have one life. You might as well be having fun with your best friends, building a product you find exciting, doing what makes you happy. And that, that really is why we’re, three people.

Emil (23:33)

Yeah, this course is about animations and people really like animations. You have posted a few stuff related to motion on your Twitter feed as well. How do you guys think about, let’s start with that. How do you guys think about motion animations at Fe? Is it something that should be built to compliment the rest or what’s the function of it at Fe?

Dennis Brotzky (24:25)

It always has to enhance the product. It has to enhance the experience. It has to make it delightful to use. And that’s the primary driver of whenever we add motion. we just added in Fade 2.0, we added the dock. And that has a ton of little details of how fast it opens, the blur, it’s resizing, and it just feels really good to use.

And that enhances the product. makes people excited to use it. And that’s where we like to add in motion. also makes the product feel more alive. I think if everything is just super static, it feels almost too boring to me. I like to have motion to like indicate where things are going. I know like linear, for example, they had their composer box. It was like go into the side and it would teach people, hey, that’s where your draft is. Follow the UI. That’s a great example of motion. We have a few things like that in Fey. And in that sense, it’s amazing.

Emil (25:42)

And when it comes to more complex motion, you mentioned Thiago designing like three states, for example, is that usually what happens? He designs like static states and you like come up with how it should animate to those states or?

Dennis Brotzky (26:02)

Yeah, he gives a rough draft, I would say. He’ll use After Effects or just static states in Figma. And then it really is up to me to like implement it, make it feel nice. Like we just released a landing page, our new portfolio landing page that had like this expanding cards kind of springing into motion. And for that, he just put one little card and then he put like six cards stacked on top of each other. And I was like, okay, they should come up like this. But obviously it’s really hard to recreate that springiness in Figma or any tool. So it’s up to me to implement it, make it feel right. And that’s what I did. That’s what I do.

Emil (26:52)

And how, how do you do use, if we get more technical, do you use frame of motion or I don’t know, CSS animations? How do you usually, what do you usually use? What’s your like stack?

Dennis Brotzky (27:06)

My stack, I use React Spring just because I have been using it for years and years and years. It’s pretty much the same as framer motion or motion nowadays. It’s all spring based. I looked up both APIs. Motion is definitely the one to pick if you’re gonna do it now. But back when I started down that path, they were kind of neck and neck or framer motion was a very new, would recommend that one definitely. But I really think The secret to any smooth feeling UI, don’t use CSS transitions. Use a library that uses springs under the hood. That’s really what’s going to make it feel like butter. If you’re wondering like, oh, why is my, my button or whatever you’re working on, it doesn’t feel quite as smooth as this other thing. It’s probably because that other thing is using a spring underneath instead of a Bezier curve or just some other thing.

Dennis Brotzky (28:12)

I don’t know if you’ve, have you found the same thing?

Emil (28:16)

I definitely agree that I guess everything looks bad. Everything is a big word, but I think, know, very, very a lot of things look better with the spring curve. I think there are a few cases. are definitely like Sonar. I think I like the animation. I made it, but you know, I like the transition that Sonar has. It’s just the ease type easing, just the default ease.

Dennis Brotzky (28:45)

The one I use all the time too. It’s the best one.

Emil (28:48)

Yeah, but you know, I think it’s almost always better to use a spring. I wouldn’t say evreything looks... like transition, looks bad, but it’s definitely easier to make something look nice with a animation.

Dennis Brotzky (29:04)

Yeah, I agree.

I think, especially if there’s motion, the spring will just take it to the next level. Like if you’re just doing a hover and changing opacity or color or something like that. Sure. She says transition is fine. But if you can put a spring into it, you’ll be very surprised how much better it feels. I know Sonar, for example, just uses ease, which is my favorite default transition.

And it makes a lot of sense if you’re going to do like a lighter weight library that everybody’s going to use. You might not want to add in a whole another library into your library.

Emil (29:34)

Yeah, and it’s a very small animation, know, like it’s just, it definitely adds to the smoothness, but it’s not a very complex animation or something like that. I think, and it’s not as big, I think you see more difference in bigger sort of movements as well. Not a very tiny one. Well, don’t know, Dynamic Island definitely looks way better with spring animations. But yeah.

Dennis Brotzky (30:14)

Exactly. That’s a perfect example. Pretty much any of the iOS stuff would not be possible with CSS transitions.

Emil (30:25)

I mean, it is not possible with CSS transitions, you know, and a lot of CSS stuff is not interruptible, which is also a big thing that I don’t think many people talk about like page view transitions API is not interruptible, which to me is a, it’s a big thing when it comes to like making something feel good. If I use key frames for sonar, yeah, go ahead.

Dennis Brotzky (30:27)

Honestly, bit of hot take, but I find almost everything implemented on the web just doesn’t feel that great. Like all the base APIs view transition. If you’re comparing it to iOS or Mac OS, these just, they’re so bad. Like I, have a new narrative.co website and built. It’s not released yet. It’s kind of been on the back burner because we have so much stuff to build, but, I use the view transition API there and it’s just. You can feel like an engineer implemented the API to kind of recreate the feeling or the functionality, but like the feel isn’t there and all the details. it’s that’s the very frustrating part about the web is it’s very limiting and you can’t always do what’s in your head. and maybe you can, but then it doesn’t work on a different browser or it drops a ton of frames. That aspect is very annoying.

Emil (31:57)

Yeah, which is not to say that like, you know, view transition API or whatever is bad. It’s great that we get closer to like iOS like experiences, but it’s also what’s kinda, well, even if the technology was here, like it’s hard to, because you interact with your phone with your like finger, you know, and it’s much more intuitive and it just feels better because there’s like less.

sort of layers between you and the phone. And here you have a mouse which feels kind of disconnected from the screen. So I don’t think, like, I really like gestures on iOS. And I made vol, which feels nice on the phone, like on the web it’s kind of useless or kind of weird to use with a mouse. But I agree with you that we, iOS has a lot of, Swift has a lot of.

It’s also way easier to create animations they have built things to make that process way easier.

Dennis Brotzky (33:03)

The most pain I know I’ll be in is when Thiago comes and he’s like, check out this animation I want you to implement. And it’s like something default iOS. I’m just like, this is not going to work on the web. It’s just not going to feel the same. Yeah. I’m very jealous of that aspect of Swift.

Emil (33:17)

Have you tried coding in Swift ever or did you do only web?

Dennis Brotzky (33:30)

Yeah, when SwiftUI came out, I gave it another shot. I just can’t deal with the feedback loop. It takes too long to compile everything. You have to set up Xcode. And it was just too slow for me. I’m too used to the web.

Emil (33:51)

I’ve never, maybe I should do it at some point, but I’m curious how that is, but maybe that. So, yeah, I don’t know. did watch some, how do you call it? Like Apple’s presentations about the stuff that they release for it. It all seems very nice. It seems like they also have like presets for spring animations. I feel like built in like ease and ease in out, but then for, you know, spring animations type of thing. so you use almost exclusively spring animations then, unless it’s a hover background change or something.

Dennis Brotzky (34:30)

Yeah, if it’s a key component on a marketing landing page or in-fe, it’s almost always using a spring. It just feels so much smoother to me. That’s all it comes down to.

Emil (34:47)

And do you have like a few spring configs that you use or do you create a spring specifically for a specific animation?

Dennis Brotzky (35:03)

Man, the amount of time I’ve fiddling with and tweaking springs is insane. So unless it’s the same component, it will have its own custom spring configuration. So intention, own friction, own mass and all that stuff. And I will obsess over that. I’ll change it by a hundred, change it by 10, change it by one take a recording of it, record my screen, play the animation, open the recording, go through the recording frame by frame by frame, see if there’s any weirdness going on, and then I’ll adjust it from there. Like for the dock on Fey.

You should have seen my desktop. had maybe 200 recordings of videos of like each frame of elements going in and out, blurring the timing of like stuff overlapping the springiness of when it closes and all those details. So yeah, definitely hand crafting each config for each element.

Emil (36:17)

And do you, when you adjust the config, do you just do it and you kind of know what this change will do? Or do you have like a visualizer for, for this or, or do you just do it and see what happens?

Dennis Brotzky (36:34)

No, think just over the years, you learn how it’s going to behave if you add more tension, if you add more friction, if you make the mass heavier, and you have a vision in your head, you’ll have a rough idea. But then just getting it all to work together. I just tweak it, refresh the page, replay it, tweak it, refresh the page, and on and on and on.

Emil (36:42)

Yeah, that’s nice. good that you say that you record animation. That’s one of the tips from the course that I gave, because I do record my animations as well and replay them frame by frame. Just like you said, I think that’s really useful.

Dennis Brotzky (37:15)

I think their DevTool has some sort of animation playback. To be honest, I’ve never really used it. I just find it easier to just do a quick screen recording.

Emil (37:28)

The dev tools in Chrome, mean, or the motion dev tools? Yeah, I think in Chrome, it’s just like for key frames, I’m pretty sure, or CSS transitions, not for the custom stuff. But I’m pretty sure like motion, you are using a React Spring, so it’s different, but motion, I think has a Chrome extension that also lets you run it frame by frame. But I think a recording, even though we...

Dennis Brotzky (37:31)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Emil (37:58)

We maybe do have something like this in the browser. A recording is more, I don’t know, realistic or it might be placebo, but I like to see the actual thing, how it behaves on an actual, I don’t know, record, how, how someone would actually see it. Maybe it’s one-to-one with a DevTools thing, but I don’t know. No.

Dennis Brotzky (38:20)

Recording is the way to do it. That’s all I’ll say.

Emil (38:24)

But so you record a lot, like really. Every animation you make, you... Yeah.

Dennis Brotzky (38:31)

If it’s a key feature or if it’s like the hero over landing page or it’s something that’s going to be used a ton. Yeah. I record it like crazy. It’s just the easiest way to see everything. Cause if you can go frame by frame and like, it’s really easy to go back and forth. Highly recommend recording it and tweaking it from there.

Emil (39:01)

Yeah. You see things that you wouldn’t or you can also record things that you think look good made by other people to see, you to, kind of learn as well, I guess, even if it’s the iOS animations that we talked about, I think that’s a great way to learn as well.

Dennis Brotzky (39:19)

Yeah, for I’ll, the amount of time that I have spent on my phone, just like dragging my finger very slowly, opening apps and like moving them with my finger, doing gestures to like fully understand how elements are blurred in, where they’re moving, where they’re coming from, the speed of stuff.

Or just testing the limits of like, I wonder if they thought of what if I hold my finger down, move it all the way and still have my finger down and then keep doing that over and over and over. And like the animation just keeps going, going, going, going, going, going, I’ve obsessed a lot over how iOS works, all the animations and the fluidity of all of it.

Emil (40:00)

What’s like the biggest surprise or what’s the biggest... Maybe you found something that is repeated in all animations that makes it look good. I don’t know. What’s like the biggest surprise or something?

Dennis Brotzky (40:29)

Biggest surprise, I would say is how simple a lot of the things are. Like I really liked the, how you can just close an app. You just flick up and I was always, when you see it in real time, you don’t realize just like the moment where the app changes to the icon. It’s very simple, but in real time, it just feels so good. The way they have like the app turning into the icon. I spent a lot of time. I thought there was some crazy secret sauce behind it, but it’s just in the end, it’s very simple. It’s a good spring curve on it and it feels really nice.

Dennis Brotzky (41:16)

A lot of things are just very simple, implemented really well with very good configuration.

Emil (41:26)

Yeah, I guess it’s a lot of trial and error as well in their case even. They try things.

Dennis Brotzky (41:34)

Without a doubt, without a doubt. That’s how you get good at anything.

Emil (41:41)

What’s like an example of good web UI. Cause Fey is considered, you know, I see Fey in like the same category as, you know, linear is a very well built software or stuff. And I think to build something like this, you have to have good taste, obviously. And what makes a good web UI to you? Have you seen something that you are impressed by? For example, yeah, I’m curious about that. Maybe you have some other app that you look up to or, you know.

Dennis Brotzky (42:23)

Yeah, I don’t have any secret app that I look up to. I think to be frank, like most web apps are shit. the biggest thing about the web that I hate is jank and like when stuff moves around. So when something loads in elements move around and they go in different places, I absolutely hate loading skeletons. I think that was.

One of Facebook’s worst creations when they added the loading skeleton. just like ruined the web experience in my opinion. Linear is definitely well-crafted. It’s all on the client, super smooth, things don’t move around. We try and do the same in Fe, although we don’t have the same sync engine and full client side, but we do a lot of preloading to make it feel very seamless.

When you open a page, things don’t move around. There aren’t loaders. And if you can achieve that, I think you’ll be in the top, top 1 % of web apps. What you want to avoid is...

If someone clicks on your page, either a ton of spinners or a ton of skeletons appear, I think that completely ruins the experience. What you want to do is try and have the data already there. And as soon as the person clicks that button, it just loads in and the page doesn’t shift around.

Emil (43:57)

What happens on the initial load then? Because that’s, there was no chance to load something before the initial load when you come into the page for the first time, like from a new tab or something.

Dennis Brotzky (44:11)

Yeah. The initial, what do you mean? Like when you’re already in the app, preload it. But if you’re just going to Fade.com for example, yeah, okay. We have, we don’t show a skeleton. just show the shapes and they stay where they are with the data. I think that’s a huge aspect. If that makes sense.

Emil (44:36)

Yeah, it does. Okay, so that’s the number one thing for you then. When it comes to...

Dennis Brotzky (44:42)

I, yeah, to me, if you can master that, if you can figure out how to get your page to load in and say you do want to put a skeleton or something, make sure the content when it loads in is where it’s supposed to be. And it doesn’t like shift around. I think, that’ll make your experience way better.

Do get what I mean?

Emil (45:08)

No, yeah, I get that. It’s just like at Vercel. did use skeletons as well. There is a lot of dynamic content and you know, like the width of some stuff, the width of the team’s name, for example, we don’t know how wide it’s going to be. So it has to shift horizontally, not vertically, which is not as bad. But like if you use skeletons, I think there is no way to do it 100% accurately, you know.

Dennis Brotzky (45:38)

Exactly. And that’s why. I hate them.

Dennis Brotzky (45:43)

I think, designed it in a way where it’ll work for any team name would be my solution to that. To me, that’s like an engineering solution thinking first of like, we have to put the team name there. we have to put a skeleton there because we don’t know it beforehand. Whereas a designer might think of, well, how can we approach this differently where we show something else other than the team name, maybe like an icon or something standard or we somehow do something. I can’t think of a solution off the top of my head, but that’s when having a really good designer helping you one-on-one goes a long way.

Emil (46:25)

Yeah. But I agree that not having skeletons at all, like makes the process way, way more easier because skeletons themselves take a lot of time and you have to update them when the design is slightly updated and everything. There is a lot of solid, like it’s way easier to, and it’s also way easier to build from linear perspective. For example, it’s easier to build new stuff in linear because it’s built differently. You don’t have to think about. Things like skeletons, for example.

Dennis Brotzky (46:54)

Yeah, data is, imagine if you didn’t have to think of the data loading in. From what I understand, linear does a lot of the caching upfront. So maybe the first time you load it. But I think they’ve gotten even smarter about that, where they’re breaking it up into different chunks, prioritizing. I’m sure they’re prioritizing the page you’re on. I’m sure they do a lot to make sure it feels super seamless.

Emil (47:23)

Yeah, but you’re right, the only thing that could load a while or longer than instantly is the initial load. But everything after that is basically instant.

Dennis Brotzky (47:23)

And it makes perfect sense for products like theirs that you always have open. It’s always on your desktop. You’re always going back to it back and forth. So, yeah, it’s good design and engineering from them.

Emil (47:44)

Yeah. All right, There are a lot of people listening that either might have a job or are trying to get one. And even if they have, maybe they want to get better at what they’re doing or even switch jobs. Do you have any advice for people that are listening to? To that are trying to get better at mainly animations, but you know, just engineering or even design in general, any advice, something that you wish you have done earlier or things like that.

Dennis Brotzky (48:22)

I think a big reason why I’m able to do what I do is because I really do enjoy it. I know it’s a very, maybe cliche answer, but if you’re not excited to be doing animations or getting better at engineering or getting better at design, maybe evaluate yourself first and figure out what you want to do. Because when you’re excited to build something, when you obsess over a hundred recordings of a single interaction or

You can’t wait to read the next design thing or you open FigMine, you’re super excited. You want to design something, you want to build something. Then everything just becomes easy. And I think people that are excited and passionate, they attract very similar people. and then that makes it very easy to find your next opportunity, your next job, whatever it is.

Emil (49:23)

Yeah, I think I agree. I think that’s the hardest part of finding a thing you enjoy doing very, very much. And then after that, it goes naturally and you build beautiful things.

Dennis Brotzky (49:33)

100%.

Emil (49:44)

But yeah, I think that’s it. Thank you for your time and great answers. know, Fey is a great product and everyone listening should at least check the site out and maybe even the product. I think you guys are only in the US. Like I’m pretty sure I cannot use it in Europe.

Dennis Brotzky (50:09)

Yeah, we focused on the US. We’re all Canadians ourselves. But US data is the most readily available. It’s the biggest market. So we’re focused on the US, but we have a lot of people asking for Europe. So we’ll see one day.

Emil (50:25)

Yeah.

Would be great even to, for people to, you know, as an inspiration even, let alone the usefulness of the product itself.

Dennis Brotzky (50:36)

Honestly, we have a lot of designers and engineers and just people in the industry. They go sign up, use Fey and then they’ll counsel and we always ask for feedback. And then it’s always like, I just wanted to interact with the app. I just wanted to learn about how this was designed. I wanted to give it a, give it a try myself and learn something new. We get that a lot. Yeah.

Emil (51:03)

Yeah, that’s a great compliment, I would say. Nice thing to hear. If people sign up just to see how great a product is.

Dennis Brotzky (51:12)

I mean, that’s the goal. That’s what we love to do.

Emil (51:15)

Yeah, cool. I guess that’s it. Thank you again for your time. Is there anything else you would like to share or tell people?

Dennis Brotzky (51:31)

I’m good. Thanks, Emil.

Interview notes

• Brotzky’s Twitter
• Fey