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Often happens that an npm package should be published to a secure registry. In many cases, organizations have their own and all the internal stuff goes there. But what to do if your organization does not have anything like that? Apparently, Github Packages are the way to go. In case your repository is private, its packages will be too! Below, I describe a simple workflow that I set today.

In our [design system] team, we struggled to understand what should be our main focus for the next year. An extra challenge is that such an understanding should be mutual. It is especially hard to gain when working remotely. Since March 2020, most companies have sucessfully put the already set processes to the remote rails. However, it is not always the case when it comes to creating something new. Despite the brainstorming sessions with interactive boards, we still act more as individuals sitting in our living rooms and basements. This is something compeletely different from the situation when the whole team was in the same room, when we had coffee breaks, lunches and afterworks, when we were in constant communication and each team member at least partly understood the viewpoint of the others. The new reality requires specific actions to substitude the natural process of getting each other. In this post, I share simple exercises we conducted with the team that helped us on the way to shared project vision.

Last year, I started my own consulting business. I have expertise and experience to offer for my clients who are willing to enhance their design and development operations and, in particular, kick-off or boost their design systems. For many months, I was working alone. And then I began to think: how can I scale? Usually, new entrepreneurs work day and night without any holiday, get clients to occupy 16 hours of their time every day, gain credibility, and partner with spin-off projects. I immensely enjoy what I am doing, and dedicating all my time to it would be only a pleasure, but as a mother of a 1-year-old, I do not have this luxurious opportunity.

Both User Centered Design (UCD) and Agile Software Development (ASD) are widely used methods in the production of user interfaces (UI). However, they “frequently putting contradictory demands on people working with the respective processes” (Jones, 2019). Trying to match different disciplines, the designers and developers are supposed to conduct alignment work which brings them to mutual understanding in the context of their work, revealing “design breakdowns” (Maudet, Leiva, Beaudouin-Lafon & Mackay 2017) early enough. This research aims to find what designers and developers who consider their collaboration process as successful value in each other.

Article at Frontside blog: Design tokens are used to keep a consistent look across an entire system. How do you name them semantically if they have to make sense everywhere but also respond to the inner logic of individual components which are independently developed?

Recently I implemented a new cool feature to one of the npm packages I develop. Later this day, I was showing it to a friend, and ... nothing worked. What a shame, I forgot to publish the package. The feature successfully passed the tests, and was pushed to the package GitHub repository but no one could not enjoy it anyway. Is there anything to help to avoid such situations? Yes, it is GitHub Actions — automated workflows that can run different jobs, including publishing packages to npm.