Cole Bemis
Design Engineer at Notion, where I spend my days fixing paper cuts and teaching Custom Agents to behave. I made Feather Icons, which means strangers on the internet call me “icon boy.” I have made my peace with this.
In 2014 I built a balsa-wood bridge that weighed 9.69 grams and held 49 kilograms before it gave up. That is roughly five thousand times its own weight. I have brought this up in three job interviews, two first dates, and one DMV line. It comes up unprompted. It will come up again.
- 9.69
- 49
- 5,061
- 2014
Fixing paper cuts at Notion and shipping Custom Agents. The kind of work where nobody notices when it’s right and everybody notices when it’s off by two pixels.
Building Lumen on the side. Currently losing sleep over the voice mode UI, which has eaten an unreasonable share of my weekends.
Trying to hand off Feather Icons to the lovely folks at Lucide, the way you’d gently leave a beloved cat with a responsible friend. Still emotionally attached.
Design Engineerat Notion
Custom Agents and a personal war on paper cuts.
Staff Research Engineerat GitHub Next
Prototyping the future, then explaining why the future has rough edges.
Creatorat Feather Icons
287 simple icons. Apparently my entire personality to some people.
Lumen is the thing I build when I should be sleeping. Right now the entire project is, functionally, a voice mode UI that I have redesigned more times than I will admit in writing. Every waveform animation you see has a sibling I deleted at 1am.
Climbing at Movement SF
A loyal member of Movement SF after a dramatic and well-documented departure from Dogpatch Boulders. I do not want to talk about it. I will, however, talk about it at length if asked.
Skiing, allegedly
Mt. Bachelor and Tahoe on an Ikon Base Pass, which I chose specifically to save money and now check the blackout calendar like it owes me rent.
Luxurious car camping
Loon Lake and Yosemite with my partner Corrine. “Luxurious” because the car has a mattress and I bring a real pillow. We are basically roughing it.
Sunday roommate dinner
7:00pm every Sunday, non-negotiable. I keep the tradition alive partly out of love and partly because it’s the easiest time to settle up the week’s shared expenses. More on that below.
I split the PG&E bill with my roommates down to the penny. Not “roughly a third.” The penny. I track the outstanding water bill with my landlord Corey Hom in a spreadsheet that has a changelog. The Venmo requests go out with itemized notes. People have asked me to stop. I have not stopped.
// note: "no rush!" (there is, in fact, a small rush)
I bought a random piece of furniture from Reperch that I had no plan for and no measurements of. It is in the apartment now. It is a chair, probably. We are getting to know each other. Early days, but I think it’s going well.
Want to talk icons, climbing routes, or the bridge?
// last load test passed. structure holding. so am I.