I was hired at GoDaddy to lead the team responsible for the component library called UXCore. The brand had just finished a painful stylistic update which introduced many breaking changes at once. The company not only updated colors and typography, but also completed a migration to React.

One of my first orders of business was to create a way to allow brand updates to occur more seamlessly. The system that had been in place before would generate dozens of new CSS files to support all the possible brand and localization changes that might be required. Luckily, CSS Custom Properties were now widely supported across browsers, so the system that we would eventually migrate to would make serious use of that technology.

To manage the number of possible values, I adopted a system that was successful at my previous company called “Intents”. These were design tokens, more commonly described as semantic tokens, which had a specific purpose and construction. The naming convention was determined in partnership with the design counterparts of the library and we eventually launched this new system within the first year of my employment.

From here, I took to the component library itself which was mostly a contributor model; many components were added that had questionable use across the organization. My major focus for the next few years was to identify areas of improvement and deprecation and begin to morph the library into a highly composable one. An assortment of pieces that could be combined easily to create more complex experiences. This work is still ongoing.

The largest part of my role is support where my responses to our communication channels is normally within 24 hours and sooner during the normal work day. It is my responsibility to triage the request and take appropriate action whether by creating a low-priority support ticket to reaching out and pairing on a video call. It is important to me that I don’t block partners but also recommend the best experience possible given all the information.