What drew you to design systems?

I worked in data visualization and map-making for most of my career, and solving design problems with data is my jam. To me there's something uniquely exciting about making a thing that can take complicated and/or unexpected input and, with no human intervention, reduce it to something visually comprehensible—and hopefully interesting!

Who have you learned from or been inspired by?

Anyone who has ever contributed to A List Apart or posted to the webdesign-l mailing list between 1999 and 2005. The CSS Zen Garden was hugely inspirational for me, along with web standards pioneers like Eric Meyer, Mark Pilgrim, and Jeff Zeldman. Jina is one of the hardest-working people in design systems, and her leadership in the community is a tremendous inspiration. I learned everything I know about SVG from Sara Soueidan, and everything I could hope to know about CSS Grid from Rachel Andrew and Jen Simmons. If you want to learn about web components, follow Monica Dinculescu and Mu-An Chiou.

Favorite tools

Vim, Things, Chrome DevTools, curl

Favorite CSS feature

box-sizing: border-box