Alan B Smith

Alan B Smith

@alanbsmith.bsky.social

👨‍💻 Principal Design System Engineer 🥃 Carb & cocktail fan account 🏔️ Boulder, CO 🅰️ Arsenal FC ⚽️ Il calcio é della gente

785 followers334 following611 posts

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

I started building an ontology / knowledge base kit, and now I'm working on a kb eval kit. I'll probably also need a runner and a kb ingestion kit after that. Over the next couple months, the goal is to have a small ecosystem of tools to manage knowledge bases. 🤞

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

I can tell how frustrated Rosie is based on the number of socks she takes captive. I had an early meeting, and we missed her walk. It was a three sock day. 🐕 🧦🧦🧦

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

I wasn't really involved in this effort, so I can't take credit for any of it. But this is a little Easter egg they snuck in. I have a good team. ❤️

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

Layoffs suck. Grief is hard. I lost an amazing icon & type designer. And I lost a design token wizard — truly one of the best at color theory I’ve ever seen. And a mobile designer / technologist who was truly amazing — design system alumni. If you’re looking to hire, I am happy to connect you.

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

I can’t understand those choices when pound-for-pound those designers punched above their weight and had a huge impact. Continued investment in design systems is never a given. Layoffs are cold, contextless, and mechanical. We still have to advocate for what we do and prove we deserve to be here.

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Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

More progress: A (prototype) ontology builder. Use Claude skills (or the CLI) to walk you through building a knowledge base step-by-step. I'm testing it to build our DS component ontology, and it's going well so far – much easier than trying to do this on my own. github.com/alanbsmith/o...

github.comGitHub - alanbsmith/ontology-kit: A beginner-friendly toolkit for building ontologiesA beginner-friendly toolkit for building ontologies - alanbsmith/ontology-kit
Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

I realized it makes sense to have separate knowledge bases for different parts of our design system (icons, tokens, components, etc). Not one big brain, more like an octopus. 🐙 But that means we need to have shared terms and structure for each knowledge base. So we need a meta-ontology builder.

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

Design systems pushed forever for people to read docs (RTFM). And in the AI era, something finally is – ty, Claude. 🙏 But unstructured data is still too unreliable. Non-deterministic output clever enough to pose as authoritative truth is worse. Design md files are a sham. We need a better system.

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

I get that with generative UI you don’t always know what will be rendered where, but it seems like you’d want to ensure you have smart containers to manage spacing elements for you. Adding margin to the end of each leaf element feels like a messy way to build predictable layouts.

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

Normally the neighborhood park goes unused, but this season, the city ran out of fields and had to set up nets here too. The result: Kids pouring In from all over the neighborhood to play pickup soccer on a beautiful evening. More of this please. Calcio è della gente. ⚽️

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

I think knowledge graphs are now a core part of a design system‘s product offering. Maybe this is just the evolution of documentation though. Similar to when we moved from style guides to shipping actual components. We’re moving from providing design data to design intelligence. 🧠

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

Kind of a long shot, but I’ll ask: Has anyone put their design patterns and rules into a proper graph db or graph RAG to support your design system ontology? Looking to bounce some ideas with someone in the design-engineer space and maybe compare notes.

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

Engineers like consuming our design tokens as JS objects. Typeahead, and JSDoc notes are great for providing context and helping them choose the right tokens. The problem is the tokens are in big objects, so tree shaking doesn't work well, and you end up with a significant performance hit.

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

I used to let slightly wrong Slack answers go without correction and assume a human reading the thread will be able to parse it out as a simple mistake. But now I make explicit corrections because it’s likely a bot will strip that response out of context as an authoritative answer for someone else.

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

Anthropic should take a note from 1990 cell phone providers and start offering off-peak token rates: 100,000 anytime tokens, with free nights* and weekends. *nightly token rates begin at 9:00pm EST

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

As a design system leader, you have to continuously prove the value you provide. But you also need the support of leaders who truly believe in your autonomy and intrinsic value of your system.

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

A mature design system is a powerful lever, and it‘s always tempting for people to want to co-opt it for their own means. Maintaining autonomy is critical for the longevity of the system and the wellbeing of the ecosystem. Becoming a tool for a specific product creates an imbalance of control.

Alan B Smith
@alanbsmith.bsky.social

I was joking with a Canadian friend tonight about how Americans are conditioned to believe we are always underdogs and will always win. We both tried to think of sports movies where the Americans don’t win, and there are exceedingly few. That probably explains a few things.