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

Writing

An illustration of the headless horseman, atop his horse, with no head, natch.

November 7, 2023

Using Wordpress as a headless CMS for Eleventy

How I avoided having to re-learn PHP and love Eleventy.

A single, tiny baby foot sticking out of some blankets in an incubator.

August 7, 2023

10 years of Extra Life

Keeping Olivia's memory alive through charity.

A hand going into the pain box from Dune, overlaid with CSS in the font Impact.

May 22, 2023

Why we're bad at CSS

And how we can improve with a practical example.

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.

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 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