About

It started with a robot

My first interest in computers started around age nine. My mom, who was a programmer back in Russia, was trying to get back into high tech after immigrating to Israel, so I asked her to explain what programming actually is. Instead of explaining, she showed me how to program in Basic, which is this pretty old programming language from the days we used floppy disks. We made a little robot that could wave and change its lights, and I fell in love with this world, where you can create something with just a few lines of code. A few years later, in my very techy high school, I realized my passion isn’t in programming itself, but in the point where technology and creative meet.

Design, technology, business, and people

Design is how things work, and it’s about understanding people. It should be innovative and smart, but it also needs to live in the real world, meet business goals, and work within given constraints. I love finding just the right solution to a problem, and I have endless motivation to learn anything new: in the old “do designers need to code” debate, I’ve always been on the “hell yes” side. For years I wrote my own front-end (HTML, CSS, Less, Sass, a bit of JS); these days it’s mostly Claude doing the typing. Knowing how a thing gets made changes how I design it.

Putting tech aside, people are the most important part of my day, be it our users or my team. Unofficially, I’ve represented design through a stretch with no manager, guided other teams into new ways of working, and started programs people chose to join. Officially, I’ve managed people at RealCommerce, a web development company, and at my own studio. Either way, the goal is the same: helping people do their best work. (Corny? For sure. I also firmly believe in “assume good intentions” and “disagree and commit.”)

Off the clock

Other than design, I’m passionate about cool, innovative technology, and about getting kids, especially girls, into tech. I’m also passionate about my own 4 kids, my dog (whose full name is Buzz Lightyear MissionBot), hackathons, and books. One of those hackathons got me a BB-8, which went on to serve as Employee Happiness Officer at my studio, InteractiveCats.

You can reach me here:
LinkedIn  ·  hello@anna-cates.com
Coffee and Oreos optional, but encouraged.