Design Systems 101: The Developer Approach to Better Frontends
A well-built design system doesn’t just make your UI consistent, it makes your product better. Better developer experience, better user experience, better product velocity. But, getting there takes more than just a component library. In this workshop, we'll take a deliberate approach to building a JavaScript design system using React, Storybook, and CSS tokens. We'll start with primitives… the layout, spacing, and typography foundations, and build upward into a structured, scalable system you can actually ship and maintain.
Mess to Modern: Refactoring a React Nightmare
Have you ever been handed a React project that felt like navigating barbed wire? 900-line components, endless useEffects, and zero modularity. Join me as we take a real-world React nightmares and refactor it live! We’ll move from an over-engineered mess to a performant, scalable app by mastering predictable state management, centralized data handling, and domain-driven structure. Leave the “mess” behind and learn how to build React components that bring order back to your code!
Need for Speed: How Modern JavaScript Frameworks Are Solving Web Performance
My first conference talk! With so many web frameworks, it often feels like the best practices are split depending on what you code in. When it comes to performance, each framework has a unique way to deal with three core problems that impact your site's performance. In this talk, we'll dive into how frameworks like Next.js, SvelteKit, and Astro think about these three core problems and align on the biggest factors when it comes to your site!
From Injured Athlete to Software Engineer — freeCodeCamp Podcast #193
In episode #193 of the freeCodeCamp podcast, I joined Quincy Larson to tell my journey in tech: from a career-ending knee injury in my first college semester, to working the front desk of an optometry office, to leading architecture transformations for healthcare systems... all before turning 23. We cover the real cost of moving fast in tech, my shortcomings with building a personal brand early on, and what I'd tell anyone who's just getting started.
UX/UI Gone Wrong: The Hidden Cost of Bad Design
Bad design isn't just a visual bug or an inconvenience... it is a business problem, it is a risk to your users, and it's costs are often invisible until it is too late. In this talk, I share examples and situations of design principles that hold this hidden cost to your UX, why you should be prioritizing UX, and the incentives behind good UX.