Everyone needs a design system. You can pick one off the shelf or put one together pretty quickly, and your problems are over. As with many things on the web, your mileage may vary. Like many things, a design system isn’t ever a finished thing — it’s a journey. How we go about that journey can affect the things we produce along the way. Before diving in and starting to plan anything out, be clear about where the benefits and the risks might lie.
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Whether you work in-house or for an external agency, we all share one challenge — dealing with stakeholders, be they your boss, colleagues, or clients. In this post, veteran web designer Paul Boag shares his approach to getting things done in even the most challenging organizations. He will also change some of our prejudices along the way. Because let’s be clear; we need other people for our websites to succeed.
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Looking for ways to create a smooth CI/CD flow for your software? In this article, Tom Hastjarjanto shares a quick list of useful concepts that can be combined with GitHub Actions and NPM packages. To fully benefit from the setup and the release with maximum confidence, it is highly recommended to have a robust test suite that runs on integration.
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Maintaining a design system is a lot of work. In this article, we will have a look at what solutions fit inside the umbrella of a Design System, and a few important steps and checkpoints you need to keep an eye on throughout your projects. Here, Atila Fassina shares his lessons learned and how a platform such as Backlight can help put together a series of tools to speed up your architecture setup.
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How do text typing and editing work on the web? Although this process might seem straightforward, there is a lot of technical nuance behind its apparent simplicity. In this article, Ilya Medvedev will explain the challenges his company faced and the solutions they used to create a text widget in their application. He’ll also dive into how they implemented it and what they learned along the way — and how typing on the web works in general.
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Automated testing can give you much confidence in merging your changes, especially in extensive refactoring or working with your teammates. As a result, you might have thought about including testing as part of your build routine to get the most value out of it. Don’t know where to start? Let’s implement your testing pipeline together from scratch.
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Markdown in all its flavors, interpretations, and forks won’t go away. However, it’s important to look at emerging content formats that try to encompass modern needs. In this article, Knut shares his advice against Markdown by looking back on why it was introduced in the first place, and by going through some of the major developments of content on the web.
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When working with JavaScript-based libraries, such as React or Vue, we work with “components” which are pieces of code grouped together. A “block” is also a component, but it is high-level, asserting a definitive purpose, and defining the requirements to produce the desired layout or functionality. It is the outermost component from the hierarchy of components wrapping each other, so it has a bird eye’s view of them. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz discusses some potential consequences as well as positive outcomes of WordPress joining the Block Protocol.
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In this article, Adrian Bece shares more about the benefits and caveats of code-splitting and how page performance and load times can be improved by dynamically loading expensive, non-critical JavaScript bundles.
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Joining a team where there are no established design practices may feel disheartening. Does this situation resonate with you? If yes, then read on — as this article is sharing the author’s advice based on his personal experience and it will show you a way (although not easy) of facing the problem in a manner that will bring other benefits, beside order and consistency.
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