Daniel Howells
Product Design & Engineering
I design and build products end to end: interfaces, systems, prototypes, content tools, and small software businesses. Currently at Materia.
I founded Siteinspire in 2009 and still run it. Before that, and around it, I have worked with studios, communities, and startups to make useful things for the web.
Work
- Materia - Product search platform with vector image search, AI recommendations, and a comprehensive design system 2024–
- Mob - Digital platform for London's largest coworking community 2019–2025
- Nomad Studio - Portfolio site for a brand identity studio known for work with Nike, Apple, and Spotify 2020–
- YCN - Platform for the UK's largest student creative awards 2020–
- Arts University Plymouth - University platform with complex content architecture for non-technical editors 2020–
Projects
- Siteinspire - The web’s gallery of exceptional design. Founded 2009. Live
- Designround - Design discovery and curation platform Building
- Stow - File storage API for developers Live
- Blomma - AI plant curation with vector search Live
- Sorrel - Pantry-aware cooking app that adapts to your taste Live
- Arc - Claude Code plugin for the full development lifecycle Building
- Routerbase - LLM model explorer using OpenRouter data Live
- Faceplacer - AI avatar placeholder service with permanent caching Live
Writing
- The Physical World Is Part of the Attack Surface - Why vibration, sound, heat, power draw, timing, and other "harmless" signals keep turning into tracking and exfiltration surfaces Apr 2026
- Spherical K-Means for Content Clustering - How cosine distance and L2-normalized centroids turn standard k-means into something that actually works for text embeddings. Feb 2026
- 11,000 Contributions - What a year of velocity looks like, and what it actually means Jan 2026
- Strict Tooling Makes AI Write Better Code - How an unforgiving TypeScript config, Biome, Husky, lint-staged, and Claude Code hooks force better output — and why format-only in lint-staged matters Jan 2026
- Vector Search Everywhere - The same pattern across art, plants, interior design, and content Jan 2026