Intro
I didn't blog again this year. I have bloggable things that I want to share, but it's just not the season of life for me. This season, I'm chasing after a curious, fearless toddler and loving every second of it. As a result, blogging has taken a major priority dive in my list of things I choose to do in my free time (what free time?!).
But maybe 2025 is the year I rejoin tech civilization after hours. Or maybe I just eat more dino nugget leftovers...
Highlights
My baby is now fully mobile. Send wine and help. But also... I changed career paths and left design systems - something I thought I'd never do.
Career update
I've been working in the design systems space for a hot minute. Even before DS became a widespread thing, I was building out pattern libraries, working with engineers to get components built, and all that jazz. To be clear - I am still VERY passionate about this space an I do see myself returning eventually.
So drum roll... I work on Player!
What I'm doing now
Well, instead of working on components, design tokens, and pattern alignment... I work on features that help developers use Player.
The ELI5 summary of my job is: I help developers create experience flows.
Think of a large application with hundreds or thousands of pages and flows. Maintaining each page and connecting each page together would be a nightmare. Enter Player.
With Player, developers write content that contains the intent of the page and how those pages should flow together. That content ultimately turns into a giant JSON file, which includes information that tells the page what UI to render. So a bunch of what I do is writing code that improves what content is supported and making sure that what developers write in content generates what they expect.
Some skills I've had to learn so far include:
- Learning what an AST is (Thank you AST Explorer)
- Learning about compilers (Thank you The Super Tiny Compiler)
- Learning what Bazel is (Bazel)
Basically my day is spent in the terminal - and I'm validating/testing content. The code I write is traversing content using Player functions, and creating new ones if they don't exist already like this one I recently contributed.
I've been primarily working on Player Dev Tools but I hope to contribute to the core project in 2025.
Professional stuff
- 👋 Joined the Player team!
- 🚀 Shipped my first OSS Player Dev Tools feature!
Personal stuff
- 🎙 Recorded 7 episodes for Code & Pixels
2024 Resolutions
We've got some exciting new stuff coming up for the podcast that I hope folks will enjoy! I also want to do more tech social things and you know, blog more than once a year. 🤞