Mar 30

The Difference Between Designers and Developers

As a non-technical founder, it can be difficult to make your first technical hire, whether it’s for a full-time employee or a contractor. If you hire a designer who can’t build web experiences, you may end up with beautiful designs and no website. If you hire a developer who can’t…

Entrepreneurship

2 min read

Feb 17, 2021

Where to Start with Design Tokens

If you’ve been researching design systems, you’ve probably come across the term “design tokens.” (If you haven’t, no worries! You can read about them here.) Even if you’ve heard the term, you might not really understand what they are or where to start. Design tokens are an approach to storing…

Design Systems

3 min read

Feb 15, 2021

How to ignore changed files when publishing with Lerna

Before tagging a new version, lerna scans your codebase for changed files. If it finds a changed file, it’ll recommend a new version. This is really useful most of the…

Lerna

1 min read

How to ignore changed files when publishing with Lerna

Before tagging a new version, lerna scans your codebase for changed files. If it finds a changed file, it’ll recommend a new version. This is really useful most of the…

Feb 4, 2021

How I audit components for accessibility

Over the past few years working on design systems, I’ve picked up some tips and tricks that can help me ensure a higher level of accessibility in the components I build. …

Design Systems

2 min read

Jan 18, 2021

Do you need to version your component library?

I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about teams that don’t version their component library. I’ve only heard one success story. Not great odds for team no versioning. Sometimes teams don’t version their library because they want to automatically propagate newly-available changes across all subscribing applications. …

Design Systems

2 min read

Published in UX Collective

·Dec 20, 2020

Design tokens 101

Web developers used to hard-code all of their style data. If a button needed a background color of blue, they’d assign the background color right at the source: .button { background-color: blue; } That worked for smaller systems that didn’t need a theming layer and weren’t undergoing frequent redesign. …

Design Systems

5 min read

Sep 23, 2020

The 5 Layers of a Design System

Picture a fully-fledged design system. You can bootstrap a new project, pull a bunch of components from the system, and have a page in minutes instead of days. When you’re first starting to build your own, it seems too good to be true. You might be asking yourself, “how do…

React

5 min read

Published in Harry's Engineering

·Apr 15, 2019

The Forge: Harry’s approach to the multi-brand component library

Written by Tim Brown and Mae Capozzi. This article was originally published on Design Systems. Most component libraries share an origin story. A growing company offers a new product or service; engineers write new code to support the new products; someone notices that the engineers keep rebuilding the same (or…

Design Systems

6 min read

Published in Harry's Engineering

·Nov 6, 2018

How We Used Gatsby.js to Build a Blazing Fast E-Commerce Site

Flamingo has landed! Harry’s, Flamingo’s parent company, serves over one million female customers. We believe that women deserve high-quality, reasonably priced, and simple body care products too. As an engineering team, we are committed to providing women with a body care experience tailored to their specific needs. It’s important to…

React

7 min read

How We Used Gatsby.js to Build a Blazing Fast E-Commerce Site

Oct 29, 2018

How to Use React.lazy

React 16.6.0 introduced React.lazy, which allows you to code-split using the new Suspense API. Siddharth Kshetrapal came out with a great video showing how this works in 60 seconds. I’d recommend watching it –– it’s really well-done. I’ve built a Github clone based off of Siddharth’s example. Hopefully this will…

Java Script

4 min read