Improving collaboration between design and engineering with the power of design systems

Writing

The Aparicios in festive Christmas attire.

January 5, 2025

2024

A look back at 2024.

Owen in a blue car, dressed as a construction worker and Ryan dressed as an astronaut.

October 31, 2024

Halloween

Reflections on my most/least favorite day.

Eldridge and me.

May 7, 2024

Eldridge

Mourning the loss of my best friend.

More posts

Working

I have over 25 years experience making websites for individual entrepreneurs to large companies and everything in between. I'm currently the Principal Design Systems Engineer at Turquoise Health. I specialize in creating custom CSS frameworks that empower engineering teams to get from concept to production quickly, while writing little to no CSS.

In my spare time, I created Dogs of Dev and 11ty Recipes. I also write a monthly newsletter, Peruvian Idle, about good stuff on screens.

Read more about the work I've done at Provi, Groupon, and elsewhere.

Streaming

A clickbait-style thumbnail with Mike throwing his hands up while screaming above a code block with some CSS that has a class of green that merely sets the color to green. A big red arrow with text in the Fortnite font reads WTF Tailwind. There is inexplicably an assault rifle from Call of Duty in the background.

I occasionally stream Office Hours, a Q&A and live-coding show about CSS, Design Systems and whatever else I'm currently working on. I also do gaming streams now and then.

Each November I do a 24-hour gaming stream as part of Extra Life Extra Life to raise money for Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago.

@peruvianidol

Speaking

I chatted with Kelly and Adekunle on the Code & Pixels podcast about CSS and design systems.

I joined Jason Lengstorf on Learn with Jason to talk about CSS in design systems. We imagined what my first week of a design systems engineer at LWJ might look like, building a CSS framework and documentation site to support a redesigned show page on Jason's website.

I returned to Frontend Horse for the Halloween Spooktacular, where Alex Trost and I made a Halloween theme for the Frontend Horse website in 15 minutes using only design tokens.

On Some Antics, Ben Myers and I talked about using Hacktober as an opportunity to get into design systems while building a small system ourselves.

I built a basic design system for Frontend Horse and talked to Alex Trost about the process.

I gave a talk at the inaugural Eleventy Meetup called Templating: Eleventy's Superpower, where I demonstrated how to create an Eleventy site in ~10 minutes.

I spoke with Superfriendly's Dan Mall on Get It Out of Your System about how communication is one of the biggest challenges in establishing a design system.

On the Command Z Podcast, I talked to Layshi Curbelo about how design systems help improve collaboration between designers and engineers.

At University of Illinois' WebCon 2019, I gave a talk called Lessons From the Coupon Factory, where I shared the evolution of Groupon's design system.

I love chatting about all things design systems and CSS. I'm available to speak on your podcast, stream or at your conference. Or we can just grab lunch!

Get in touch