# Taurean Bryant (@taurean.bryant.land)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/taurean.bryant.land
Headline: Product engineer ✵ design systems at scale, full products end to end

## About

I build, ship, research, and repeat, using each to inform the other. I spent five years leading design systems work at apree health. Since then I've expanded from the front of the stack to all of it; designing, building, and shipping my own software start to finish, most recently on the AT Protocol.

## Career

- **Organizer at Ecosystem Action Research** (Feb 2026 - Present)
  Volunteer · Remote
  A collective making public-interest internet technology, particularly the AT Protocol ecosystem, legible and usable for everyday people. Joined ahead of public launch.
- **Product Engineer at Independent** (May 2024 - Present)
  Independent work · Remote
  Design and build software on the AT Protocol:
  
  Squire (squire.guide) — task management with algorithmic prioritization; reached 94 weekly active users.
  Drydown (drydown.social) — a social fragrance journal.
  Suede + Stylebase — the SvelteKit project template and CSS framework both products are built on.
  
  Won "Most Useful" at Letta's Personality Design Hackathon (2025) for Sonder, an AI agent offering life advice on Bluesky. Followed it with Cloudseeding, an open-source Deno/TypeScript service for running Bluesky agents accountably: each agent writes a record to its own PDS disclosing it as AI and naming the human responsible for it.
  
  Co-run 3-3 (3-3.fyi), a monthly newsletter and meetup for designers and builders, since February 2025.
- **  at Career Break — Health & well-being**
- **UI Engineer at Apree Health (formerly Castlight Health)** (Jan 2018 - Jan 2023)
  Led the migration to design tokens and refactored scattered Sass architecture (mixins, functions, maps, variables) into a standalone repo shared across products.
  Consolidated roughly two and a half separate front-end codebases into one, all served by the same design system.
  
  Drove Storybook adoption, wrote the CSS and design-system process documentation, and ran workshops teaching engineers maintainable SCSS and accessible, standards-based front-end code.
  
  Refactored aging Angular components for performance and WCAG 2.1 compliance; advised the retrofit of a mobile-only app into a responsive, desktop-class experience.
  
  Role eliminated in restructuring following Castlight's acquisition by Vera Whole Health.
- **Lead Product Designer at Edyt** (Nov 2014 - Jan 2018)
  Designed a workflow platform for patent examiners (intake, document annotation, prior-art mapping, response drafting, and internal operations) that became one of the largest government software projects in Europe at the time.
- **  at Earlier** (Jul 2011 - Nov 2014)
  Freelance product, web, and brand design for startups and agencies (2012–2014), including the design workload for several MTV/VH1 shows in the run-up to the VMAs. Visual designer at Grooveshark (2011–2012): advertising design for Pepsico, Adidas, Absolut, and Samsung.

## Skills

### Technical
- AT Protocol
- Cloudflare
- React
- Svelte
- TypeScript

## Projects

- **Squire** — https://squire.guide (Apr 2026 - Present)
  A knight-themed task scheduler, Squire acts as an engine for sorting and scheduling your tasks so nothing falls through the cracks, gets done last minute, or causes unnecessary stress.
- **Drydown** — https://drydown.social (Feb 2026 - Present)
  A social fragrance journal, built on the same platform you’re seeing this on. Currently in an early ✴︎experimental✴︎* stage.
- **Suede + Stylebase** — https://tangled.org/taurean.bryant.land/suede (Apr 2025 - Present)
  SvelteKit project template and the CSS framework beneath it
- **Palace** — https://github.com/taurean/palace (Mar 2025 - Present)
  an opinionated starter system for building an Obsidian vault with staying power.
- **Cloudseeding** — https://tangled.org/taurean.bryant.land/cloudseeding (Nov 2025)
  open-source repo for running AI agents responsibly on Bluesky
- **Haiku** (May 2024 - Nov 2024)
  stream-of-consciousness journaling app, built during buildspace s5 (2024)

## Involvement

### Volunteering
- Ecosystem Action Research (Feb 2026 - Present)
  An initiative to facilitate cooperative, research-led innovation in the AT Protocol ecosystem.