Hi everyone, it’s time for me to make a first recap of where am I today on this journey.

I started this new project 3 months ago and a lot of things happened since then.

At the beginning, there was just a simple question : Why some companies who have money and resources doesn’t invest in the building of a design-system even tough they are in a situation where a design-system could be a major gain for the entire company ? Since then, I’ve fully committed to this question by ending my current contract in order to leave myself as much time possible to work on it. In order to bring a real answer to the initial question, the first step from me was to clarify the problem and how I can bring a relevant solution to this. To do this, I’ve contacted a lot of people, mainly developers, in order to get their feedback and advices. All those informations helps me to materialise what could be the best solution, the next step then was to build a POC (Proof of concept) and a static website in order to explain the project and eventually get emails of potentials interested people.

The static website

The first step and for sure the hardest one for me was to make the designs of the website. Hopefully for me, this was not the first time I had to design something, I love to design during my free time some ideas of some fake apps or website, however I’m still a completely beginner and I’m very far of what could have done a professional graphic designer. It takes me some weeks to do but I’ve ended with something that was great for a first version. Concerning the tools I used, I’m used to design on online wireframe tools but I’ve recently became a fan of Figma, so yeah, I used Figma for this project as well.

I’ve started recently to integrate the designs and I’m very close to the end. For the integration, I took the choice of using for the first time TailwindCSS. It’s been a long time that’s I’m hearing a lot of good feedbacks about Tailwind and I took the opportunity of this project to discover it. After few hours of using it (~15h), my first impressions about Tailwind are really positive. Even if the start is very slow because of the learning curve, it’s safe to say that Tailwind in addition of saving you to write hundred lines of CSS will significantly speed up the styling process. I’ve found it particularly powerful for the responsive management and the grid and flexbox layout management.

I’m really confident for the publication of the website in the coming months, but I would wait until the POC has advanced enough to publish it.

The POC

Naturally, the big part of work to do is obviously on the POC side. I always found difficult when building a POC to find the right balance between the core feature to demonstrate and some sides features that are less important but very relevant in the global workflow. It’s also difficult to not commit too hard on user experience and user interface. As a front-end developer I just can’t be satisfied of a poor interface even if the business logic is working well.

I started the development of the POC 2 months ago and a lot of codes have been pushed since, however I would have liked to be further in the development. Actually, I’m very close of completing the basic component edition workflow from the client app to the database. The next big step will be the generic translation of designs-tokens to code. In order to do this translation, I’m using a really project called style-dictionary. I will soon make an article about it, because they deserve it.

That’s it for today. See you soon !