Bob, that sounds like a rough 9 months.

I’m curious to learn more about your situation:

• What’s your design background? Do you have formal training or are you self taught?

• Where are you looking for jobs? What part of the country/world?

• What do you mean by “UX designer”? Are you focused mainly on user flows and information architecture, or is your experience more broad? Visual design, user research, brand/content strategy?

This pattern overloads a pretty critical affordance when a simple filter pattern would do.

Narrowing down your IA to four or five important top level locations is hard to do, but it’s an important part of good design.

This commentary reeks of “first world problems“

The ability to "Fix position when scrolling" on an element in the background.

It's a little insulting that Apple won't make a less pricey display for professional users who don't have quite the insane requirements this monitor satisfies.

To throw salt in the wound, they're still selling an LG display that isn't even the most up to date version that LG offers.

My team creates separate symbols for each state of a component, but only for the simple elements like text fields and buttons.

For more complex organisms, we build example symbols that we expect to break apart as soon as we place them in a new design. These example symbols are more intended to give guidance rather than being unchangeable objects.

In my opinion, there's still no replacement for a Wacom tablet when doing heavy professional work. The precision and speed of a stylus+tablet leaves a mouse or trackpad in the dust. There's also a huge benefit for preventing repetitive stress injuries.

One drawback, you loose out on a lot of the cool gestures, but you can get those back by adding a trackpad on the other side of your keyboard. See MKBHD's pics for a demo.

Right now my team is using InVision to share ideas and aesthetic choices, Sketch Cloud for version control of our design system, and Zeplin for handing specs to developers.

I'm not really happy with it, but I haven't found a better solution.

Mac/iOS: Polymail

Your portfolio is very handsome and the work featured is absolutely solid. But what do you want it to do for you?

It could be, you simply mean for this to be an online calling card for professional contacts you meet out in the world. If that's the case, this design is fantastic.

But if you're hoping that this portfolio will help you get work, or land a job, it's not a great solution.

As a hiring manager, a candidate's portfolio has to do one thing right away: It should demonstrate that the candidate has the necessary skills I'm looking for. And very few product design jobs involve visual UI design but nothing else.

So show me more of your process. Show me how you think about user flows and narratives. Show me how you conduct research and testing. Show me how you evaluate the success of a feature. Show me how you interact with cross-disciplinary team members.