- The pink hair is back.
And here I am back for another working from home vlog.
It's been a busy few weeks.
I have not been able to spend as much time
on our design system as I've been wanting to.
And it is time, people,
to like knuckle down and work on it.
But to catch you up,
and I do have a video
going into more detail about this coming out next week,
but we're launching a new version of convertkit.com,
our marketing site.
Corey, the developer on our team
has been making great strides
in the code base for the new version of this site,
but on the design system side of it,
we are just not there yet.
We have a lot of work to do.
I'm gonna spend some time working on it today,
so that's what this vlog will largely be about.
Because we just need to up the level
of collaboration and like, you know, communication
between design and dev on that.
But speaking of dev,
before we get into my design system work
this vlog is sponsored by Stack Overflow
which is an incredibly useful tool for anyone writing code.
And every year, they run a survey into the like,
basically like the life and times of developers.
What tools are they using?
Where are they at in their careers?
How much are they being paid?
What languages and things are they looking to learn next?
The results of it give us a really good idea of the trends
in dev land and you know, what's happening there.
And I, especially, you know, me, I like to
I like to be transparent about salaries
and things like that.
So this section here,
I'm just looking at last year's report
of the average salaries, median salaries, sorry
are really fascinating.
I am super curious
to see if this has changed in the past year.
And that's what the 2022 results will tell us.
The survey is for developers
and they define developer as anyone who codes.
So that's why you see designer on that list.
I'm a designer who codes.
So I fill out the survey
if you are the same
or if you are a developer for your job
then you should go fill it out.
I'll leave a link to it down below in the description.
And I don't know,
I just think that contributing to research like this
is something we can all do as internet citizens right?
To make use of the fact that the internet
connects us to people all over the world
and that we can learn from
just beyond our immediate community.
And that's what happens through the survey.
The more people who fill it out
the more accurate the results are,
the more interesting the findings end up being
cause it encompasses more people, you know,
so go fill it out.
Take a few minutes, contribute to the research.
There was a question about crypto
that I'm particularly interested in
seeing the answer to when the results are launched.
And I just noticed this one in last year's survey as well.
What do you do when you get stuck?
Feels very validating to see that 86%, 89%
of developers who responded said they Google it,
cause that is what I do too.
I am going to now set you down on my desk, I think,
and I'm actually going to get set up for a livestream.
Wow, we need to tilt the camera.
Just like it's been a while
since I worked on our design system,
it's been a while since I did a livestream
and I'm excited to get back into it today.
I'm gonna do, like, a Pomodoro as a group
with the coworking club.
So I'm gonna run a timer on screen for 25 minutes
and we're just gonna like focus and work
and I'm not gonna annotate
and like talk through my designs
like I usually do.
Should be interesting. I don't know.
We'll see how it goes. I gotta get set up.
(upbeat music)
Hello friends! Welcome to the coworking stream!
(upbeat music)
All right, stream is done.
It is bloody hot in here.
I'm going to open the door and let some fresh air in here.
I've made some good progress
on setting up a page,
which is the first one I'm like testing the design system in
and have written a list of things that I've noticed
are not serving us in the way that components
and like styles are currently set up.
So now I have a list of things to fix,
but the one thing I want to call out
is a change that we realized the other day
that we need to make
to how we've got things set up in Figment.
So this is our like typography styles.
And instead of just referring to like the pixel size
of the the type, we've tried to use the tailwind number
which comes from the spacing system
where like as you can see here, where is it, 56?
56 is 14 in like tailwind spacing unit.
However, I was talking to Corey the other day
and noticed that...
Wow.
This is the downside of having to have the door open,
I guess.
Okay. We're just gonna shut that
while I finish talking to you.
Anyway, I noticed the other day in talking to Corey
that the way he has fonts like sizing written
in the code is using more like t-shirt sizing.
So it said three XL, two XL, XL, et cetera
rather than using that tailwind unit.
So I think in our attempt to reflect the code base,
we actually have ended up not reflecting the code base
and we need to change that
cause it's really important for us
that we're all speaking the same language.
And like, I don't know if we say to Corey,
oh this text should be size 11 instead of size 14.
It's got to be clear for him what that means.
And so we're going to, I think,
switch out the naming convention
in Figment here to use the same t-shirt sizing
as Corey does, cause I think that makes more sense honestly.
It's very clear and self explanatory
to say extra small versus extra large
when you're talking about the text.
I don't know.
This whole thing is really a process, right?
We're figuring out how to work together in this new way
because we have never had a system that's been,
yeah, this aligned before.
And I'm sure we will run into many more things like this,
where it's like we thought we were doing something one way
and then the other person is doing it a different way.
Yeah. It's just all about communication,
really talking about this project a lot,
so that we're checking in at the different stages.
All right.
I have a meeting in 15 minutes
so I'm gonna go and have a quick break
before we get back into the meeting chunk of my day.
(upbeat music)
Standing up for the afternoon,
cause I was feeling like I just needed a bit more energy.
I have about an hour until my next meeting,
and I think what I need to dive into
is some workflow building.
We've been using web flow as sort of like overflow
for our coding needs at the moment.
Cause there's two designers,
but only one developer on our team.
We just have a lot of like dev needs
and it's simply too much for one person right now.
I think with the new site we're working on
with the new code base, everything's gonna be
much more efficient and faster to build.
So maybe we'll be set up to be good there.
But for now our conference site,
for example, is one that I built in web flow
and we needed a full agenda page.
All we have right now is this bit here
and I need to get all of the information into it.
So I'm going to spend the next hour
getting as far as I can with this,
it looks like Corey and David have connected
about that type size issues that I was talking about too.
So that's good.
We're going to get on the same page about that.
Flooring my desk back down again
for my one last meeting of the day,
I hit an unfortunate snag in the web flow stuff I was doing.
I was trying to nest three levels of connect collections,
I guess like there was one CMS collection
referencing one field and then within that reference field
referencing something else.
That'll make no sense if you don't use web flow.
But yeah, anyway, hit a snag.
That's not possible in web flow.
Although people keep recommending me a like plugin,
I guess, add on?
That might maybe be able to do it.
But yeah, it's things like that
where I'm reminded of like, ahh,
this is why it's helpful to have complete control
over a page.
As great as no code is, you know,
sometimes you just need to be able
to get a developer in there
and I don't know, do this sort of stuff.
Cause I know that if we had the capacity
to be coding this page in WordPress
that would be something that, you know
would be easy to do.
We wouldn't be blocked by that, by our own code base.
Anyway, gonna sign off here
for this last meeting of the day.
Please go check out that Stack Overflow survey
that I mentioned at the start of the vlog.
Fill it out if you are a person who codes,
whether that's for fun
whether you're employed as a developer,
you're a designer who codes, like me.
Contribute to the research
and we're all gonna learn a lot from the results.
And I'm sure that I will report back
on those results in a future vlog as well.
Cause like I said,
especially interested to see how the salary data
has changed over the past year,
especially with, I don't know,
we've been hearing some big numbers recently
so I'll be curious to see how that shakes out.
But yeah.
Thanks for watching, hope you have a good week,
and I will see you in the next vlog.
Bye.
(upbeat music)