Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth

I recently wrote a post about Facebook being a needy sonofabitch. They desperately try to get you there, and once they have you they do all they can to keep you there. It’s like a restaurant that bombards your doorstep […]

This letter laying out concerns about AMP seems pretty reasonable to me.

On January 1st, 2013, I started my own company. Over the last 5 years I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of great work with a lot of great people, travel all over the place to talk about the […]

Reading this post by Trent about the importance of third-party scripts, and I’m reminded of an older post of mine about how component libraries can be used to help surface invisible elements like third-party scripts. The idea is that someone […]

I’m not going to buy any stuff for myself. – This sounds extreme, but I’m very much excited for this resolution. I have plenty of stuff in my life. I wouldn’t call myself a rabid consumerist, but I feel that I’ve fallen […]

In classic Vitaly fashion, here’s a gigantic article that includes a ton of tools and tips for all things frontend performance. They even included my performance budget builder, which I forgot I made!

I absolutely love Chris’s sentiment here. It’s easy to get into a heated discussion about frameworks, what type of class names make the most sense, which optimization techniques are most important, or what part of your code base is should […]

Throughout 2017, when people asked how I was doing, I’d say “Great…for the things I can control.” 2017 was a rough year at a macro level for everybody, and I found myself coping with the state of the world in […]

I have the extreme privilege of working with Jamie on client projects, and I absolutely love his approach to development. Rather than deliberating over lengthy conversations about what can and can’t be done, Jamie dives in, plays, and prototypes. As […]

This is a fantastic, critical take on design systems by Rune Madsen. I found myself violently nodding along with a lot of the critical points made in the presentation, especially around tooling: I find it really fascinating when I see […]

For the first time in almost 5 years, I don’t have an upcoming trip planned. Not for a client, not for a conference, not for a workshop, not for personal reasons. I’ve been extraordinarily privileged  to be able to travel […]

I had a great time chatting about design systems with Aarron Walter, Jina Anne, and Marco Suarez. We covered a lot of ground, from what exactly is a design system, how they help, interface inventories, design tokens, making patterns a […]

I wrote and self-published a book called Atomic Design, and I’m really pleased with how the whole thing turned out. I want to share my experience largely because I think the process has a lot to offer other authors who […]

Creating a design system to serve an organization’s digital products is a delicate dance of decision-making, compromise, and balance. There are some intrinsic frictions that every organization creating and maintaining has to address. There’s no shortage of eternal battles in the […]

I absolutely love love love this presentation by Yesenia Perez-Cruz (@yeseniaa)‏. In it, she talks about creating a design system to power Vox Products’ suite of websites, each of which that have their own strong, individual personalities. Yesenia’s talk is especially […]

Design system + machine learning = instantly going from whiteboard sketch to working code. Fucking incredible. In my talks and workshops I discuss how the existence of living components in a design system means that teams can leap-frog over a […]

Adam McClean and Dan Mall had a fantastic chat with Jared Spool about the work we did to help transform About.com into the new Dotdash. We took their monolithic brand and exploded it into a suite of topic-specific brands, with […]

The title says it all. Great description of why docs are so important, why it’s hard to make them, and some tips for prioritizing them.

There are some fantastic insights contained in Mina Markham’s post about their rebuilding Slack.com. I especially loved her describing some of the thorny aspects of enhancing to CSS Grid layout, as well as seeing a before-and-after histogram of CSS specificity. […]

This phenomenal post by Sarah Federman dives into the language we use to define design systems. I personally think this is the best description of the lexicon of design systems I’ve encountered. I’ve always been a bit wary of only […]