Alan B Smith

I like beating Chelsea very much. Good match. 😊

Hahaha so much joy! Thanks for sharing. I feel the same way about popcorn. 😂

Shit. I’m so sorry that happened, but I’m glad you’re able to take some time for yourself.

Hugs to folks at Block. 🫂

That‘s wild! Glad y’all are back at home and recovering. 🫂

Rows of green triangular pasta rest on a wood cutting board.

triangoli di spinaci

The first rule of writing (as you know) is to consider your audience. Engineers shouldn’t have design information excluded, but it also shouldn’t be front and center. Content should be prioritized based on the user type, and static sites are generally bad at that.

Appreciate the nuanced response, and I largely agree. This is helpful for me — thank you. 🙏 Having a unified language across design and eng is important, and silos are bad.

But I also think our current single documentation system stinks, and often prioritizes designer information over engineering.

Instead, I think it makes more sense to invest in getting code docs into VSCode and Cursor: Engineering-specific content in their workspace. That’s the best possible experience, IMO.

React Spectrum Build high quality, accessible UI with the cohesive look and feel of Adobe.

I know I’m biased, but it’s hard for me to understand why engineers, by far our largest user group, don’t get a first-class documentation experience.

Spectrum solves this by creating an engineering sub-site, which is awesome, but it doesn’t decrease your maintenance cost.

react-spectrum.adobe.com

Time, capacity, and more overhead, yeah.

At the same time, I don’t think a shared docs site provides the best experience for engineers. They really only care about a subset of the information on our docs site but have to sift through lots of non-pertinent content.

There’s a considerable amount of complexity to integrate our all code docs into our docs site. We also have to support different audiences: designers, web eng, native mobile eng, etc. On top of that, we need to manage internal and external information. It adds up fast!

It’s increasingly difficult for me to justify the cost of having design system engineering docs in an external site all in the name of having a “single-source of truth.”

“Docs in your workspace” has always been the goal, and IDEs are making huge advances to provide a better overall experience.

Alan holds a single raviolo in the foreground. In the background, a half sheet of 35 fresh ravioli wait to be thrown into the pot to boil.

Tonight’s pasta

There was so much celebration in that halftime show — even a wedding (what?!?) Even if you didn’t understand the words, you could feel the joy.

And in the midst of so much darkness and despair, that joy is what we’re fighting for. That’s what gets us through this.

The audacity of a design system is believing you can gain enough momentum and leverage to meaningfully move an ecosystem that dwarfs your small, scrappy team. And then continue do it over and over again.

We're either eternal optimists or completely mad. Maybe both.

HugOps to the GitHub Actions folks. 🫂

I’m so proud of my team, but it’s also pushing us beyond the limit. It’s so easy to get stuck in GSD mode, but that’s not who we are. We are working on ways to bring humanity back into our workflow. Every act of humor and silliness is an insurrection against grind culture.

We have been so busy with this design system refresh and we still have a long way to go. We are updating everything about our design system: color, type, icons, space, shape, shadows, and motion. We’re supporting web, iOS, and Android at enterprise scale: hundreds of teams and millions of users.

If we ever get dark mode across all of Workday, we’re calling it Worknight. Mark my words. 🌙

It would be helpful to have a mechanism for design system maintainers to do “tours of service” where they are embedded with product teams for a bit.

Feels like it would build empathy for product teams and also help teams use the system better.

I think USDS used to have something like that.

It’s really easy to get lost in the weeds with design token updates, so yesterday i started using Observable to get a better feel of the overall structural changes we’re making as we work through our next major version of tokens.

observablehq.com/d/02acae47b1...

It would be nice to have a hotline where you could report heinous design crimes. No one has to listen on the other end, I'd just like to vent.

I'll feel better when we get through this phase of every interface showing a popup to tell me how I can use a new AI feature I don't need to complete a task I'm not doing.

Very glad to hear Sharpe is staying on. Really nice guy, and he’s doing good work at the club.

The hardest problem in design systems is whatever problem I was just working on.

Nothing revolutionary, and you're probably already doing all that. Sorry you're in the weeds. Hang in there.

Sometimes it's unreal, right? 🫂 Like how did I get myself into this mess? 😅

Agree with aggressive prioritization. I make lists – feels good to cross things off. I prioritize my immediate team needs over external requests. I block off my calendar. But sometimes it's still just too much.

Six lemon cream tartlets sitting on a mat ready to chill for the night.

Late night patisserie.

Masters of War

Still relevant words, unfortunately.
open.spotify.com/track/7xVpkV...