Maxime Podgorski

I started writing Java in middle school and designing on the side. Small games, broken websites, logos for no one. Just the kind of kid who couldn't stop making things. When I landed my first design internship, I had no idea what I was getting into. But something clicked, and I stayed.

The real shift happened when I met a lead who lived in both worlds. Designer and engineer. Someone who understood why an interface felt right, and could build the architecture to make it hold. That's when I knew what I wanted to become. So I started bridging the gap myself, learning to code what I designed, designing what I could ship.

Five years in studios taught me the rest. Fintech, banking, biotech, gaming. Three enterprise design systems built from the ground up. And through every single one, the same frustration kept surfacing. Most teams treat a design system like a component library. Drop in a few buttons, call it shipped. But then Figma drifts from code, tokens fall out of sync, and designers start working around the system instead of with it. A real system governs how design and engineering move together. Almost nobody builds it that way.

At some point I needed to push the ideas I had in my head as far as they could go. Put myself in conditions where I had to learn, try, and build things I'd never done before. So I did. An open‑source library to share the patterns I kept rebuilding. AI tooling to kill the manual work nobody should be doing. And Lyse, an agent I co‑founded to handle the project management that buries tech teams today. Everything I ship runs in production. That's the only metric I care about.