Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth

I like playing music a lot. I love it, in fact. Playing music gives me an enormous amount of physical, mental, and spiritual satisfaction. I’m fortunate in that I get play music in some capacity every day, often starting my […]

I am thoroughly enjoying this Web Components & Stencil.js course by Maximilian Schwarzmüller. Really clear, enthusiastic instruction and great real-world examples. I’d highly recommend taking this if you want to get your head around web components.

I’m still processing this pandemic as I putter around my house and deep clean my kitchen. I’m pretty far away from being able to form fully coherent thoughts, so here’s some scattered thoughts that keep popping into my brain: For […]

These are strange, surreal times. I hope everyone’s staying as healthy and safe as they can be out there. It’s really difficult to process the gravity of the coronavirus outbreak, especially since the situation keeps changing by the day (or […]

I’m working on a couple themeable design systems right now, and we’re architecting components to offer a white list of themeable CSS properties, so each brand can define their design language using design tokens and then pipe those through into […]

A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super […]

Well-documented code guidelines and standards are absolutely critical for creating consistent, cohesive code together. Especially in the context of creating a design system’s component library, it’s crucial to establish consistent API and code conventions to create an excellent user developers’ […]

I just got a fantastic year-in-review breakdown from RescueTime that showed how I spent my (screen) time in 2019. It gave me some really insightful and beautiful data visualizations like this: Aside from the depressing realization that 30% of my […]

I had the pleasure of popping by Google’s NYC office to chat with Rick Viscomi of Google Chrome Developer’s State of the Web series about design systems, atomic design, designer/developer collaboration, and a bunch of other topics. One of my […]

I switched my default browser on both desktop and mobile to Firefox. It was incredibly painless to do and literally haven’t noticed anything different besides the UI. Reasons My reasons for switching? I’m not entirely sure to be honest. While […]

Hoo boy, a blog post rebounding a blog post which rebounds a blog post. Let me jump on this train! Jeremy Keith clearly articulates a concern about design systems I often hear from many designers: In that light, design systems […]

A disease of abundance requires abstinence, not antidotes. Frank rounds up a collection of reasons that he burnt out. As I come to grips with my own burnout, I’m finding others’ stories and output to be tremendously beneficial. I see […]

If I would have to list the main reasons why Web Components work so greatly for Duet Design System, it would be these four things: Tech-Agnostic Instead Of Tech-Specific In order to create modular interfaces, a design system needs to be […]

Last night I had the pleasure of welcoming Ben Callahan and Rob Harr from Sparkbox over to my office/studio to hang out, talk shop, and play a little music. Ian and Melissa joined us and we had some fun jamming […]

An open-source checklist to help you plan, build and grow your design system. Source: Design System Checklist

Good read about letting “clean code” go. As the years go by, I increasingly err on the side of legibility over cleanliness. Sure, things could likely be tightened up, but does it really matter? If the code works, then there’s […]

When I graduated college and started my first full-time job in NYC, I was all in. It’s a pretty common occurrence, especially in smaller companies: a junior dev thrown into the deep end, they flounder a bit, they learn a […]

We had a blast working with Dotdash (formerly About dot com), and it’s awesome to see the design system foundation we helped them establish translate into major success, as written up by Fast Company. Maybe you’ve never even heard of Dotdash, […]

Here are a few random stories from my last couple weeks of work. We have a datepicker field that has a calendar SVG icon sitting on top of the field. There was an issue where clicking the icon wasn’t triggering […]

This article is a year old, but I just finished up reading a newly-released audio book (or is it a podcast? or chaptered interview series? I dunno.) where the author interviews a number of people who have experienced the kind […]