SourceTree

Get to know your designer

By on October 14, 2015

What Iā€™m doing with my life

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I’ve been with Atlassian for 4 years now — 2 years in San Francisco and 2 in Portland. I started out as Bitbucket’s first designer and have since traveled through SourceTree, HipChat, and now back to SourceTree. I love the intersection of design and code, so creating developer tools is exactly where I want to be. I’m a full stack developer, who has written code on just about every platform. I have no bias when it comes to Windows vs OSX.

Things I’m good at

Things I like

I spend a lot of time thinking about

On a typical Friday night I am

Trying to solve the Chiliad Mystery.

What I’m bringing to SourceTree

sourcetree_blueprint

Well, I’m the dude who made the SourceTree logo, so there’s that! You can check out my previous work on Dribbble and CodePen to get an idea of my trajectory.

SourceTree is an amazing app, with a huge following. I’m honored to work on it again, and will do my best to respect the existing users, while growing it in the right direction for future Git audiences. This means some of the UI clutter will get simplified, but all of the power will still be there.

I understand developers like density and utility. I promise to not increase the whitespace just because I feel it “breathes better.” My personal goal is to make you feel like you’re living in the future when you use SourceTree. Great things are coming, hold on to your butts.

10 Comments

  • disqus505
    Posted October 14, 2015 at 7:16 pm | Permalink

    Show us.

  • Hsiang Lee
    Posted October 15, 2015 at 6:58 am | Permalink

    We mostly use source tree here in our company, but I keep going back to Tower because of its interface! If only source tree could improve its interface I think it will be a big reason for me to ditch Tower for that. šŸ˜›

    Good luck and we’re excited for it šŸ™‚

  • gonewest818
    Posted October 18, 2015 at 2:58 pm | Permalink

    Serious question, though. I know choice of supported platforms is probably not your call, or at least not solely your call. One future I would like to be living in is the one where SourceTree is also ported and properly supported on Linux.

    I mean, Windows and OSX are fine as far as it goes but the *entire* backend of *every* project I have ever worked on is Linux, and significant numbers of the development teams also Linux. Just saying.

  • orrange
    Posted November 18, 2015 at 6:14 pm | Permalink

    Are there any plans to offer a Linux version of the tool?

  • EZimes
    Posted February 19, 2016 at 1:07 am | Permalink

    “This means some of the UI clutter will get simplified, but all of the power will still be there.”

    Version 2.2 dumbs down the UI and removes some functionality. Way to go!!

  • disqus505
    Posted February 19, 2016 at 12:08 pm | Permalink

    Has Atlassian given up on SourceTree?

  • disqus505
    Posted February 22, 2016 at 7:53 am | Permalink

    ST keeps getting worse. Rollback recommended after 2.2 release is a disaster. You guys really don’t know WTF you’re doing anymore, do you?

    • xared
      Posted February 22, 2016 at 11:53 pm | Permalink

      Hate to agree but I feel it too. All that gray, missing buttons like Git-flow (like come on!) is really not productive but the opposite. We need better functionality please. And functional design.

  • Dakkaron
    Posted February 23, 2016 at 8:38 am | Permalink

    So, you are responsible for that trainwreck of a new UI?

  • codeowl
    Posted March 1, 2016 at 11:18 pm | Permalink

    I agree… terrible, just terrible design choices… plus a super buggy release. Within 2 mins I had rolled back to 1.7. SourceTree would no longer see any of my repositories after I upgraded… as soon as I rolled back everything worked again as it should. Having an all grey interface is like having a conversation with someone that has a really thick accent, and doesn’t have a good grasp of your native language. You can work with them, but you have to work a lot harder to extract the information you want, in order to get the job done, and as a result, there are more opportunities for error.

    I guess MS bought the start menu back in windows 10 and fixed a heap of the other win 8 issues… so maybe you guys can bring the colors back, and fix all the other bugs… hopefully you can do it way quicker than MS did.

    I used Source Tree because it was great, not because it is free. I am more than happy to pay a yearly fee for a good product, and if this is not fixed soon, I will go looking for something more reliable, and happily pay for it.

    …