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

Writing

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.

The Pit Viper logo in six different color schemes.

April 3, 2024

Theming Design Systems

A look at Pit Viper's theme system.

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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