Hello World

· 2 min
metaintroduction

After years of building design systems and contributing to internal wikis, it’s time to think out loud in public.

I’m Brian, a Design System Engineer at Bonterra where I lead Stitch, our design system. My days are spent in the intersection of design and engineering—building component libraries, defining API patterns, optimizing performance, and ensuring accessibility isn’t an afterthought.

What I’ll Write About

This blog will focus on the craft of building interfaces that scale:

  • Design systems architecture: Token strategies, component APIs, versioning approaches, and the organizational challenges of scaling design systems across teams
  • Developer experience: How we design tools that other engineers actually want to use—because a design system no one adopts is just well-documented code
  • Accessibility: Building inclusive interfaces from the ground up, integrating ARIA patterns thoughtfully, and making accessibility a first-class concern rather than a checkbox
  • TypeScript patterns: Type-safe component APIs, design token systems, and leveraging the type system to catch errors before they reach production

Why “Tangents”?

The best conversations happen in the tangents—those moments when discussing a button component leads to rethinking your entire state management strategy, or debugging a focus trap surfaces a fundamental assumption about keyboard navigation.

This is a space for those tangents. Explorations, lessons learned (often the hard way), and occasional strong opinions loosely held.

Outside of Code

When I’m not thinking about design systems, I’m involved in theater as an artistic director, writer, and director. Both disciplines share a surprising amount: attention to craft, collaborative problem-solving, and the pursuit of creating experiences that resonate with people.

Theater taught me that the structure you can’t see—blocking, pacing, spatial relationships—is just as important as what’s visible on stage. The same is true for component APIs: the abstraction you don’t see determines whether the interface is intuitive or frustrating.

Thanks for being here. More to come.