This week has been somewhat intense and a lot of fun - both can be true! A teammate and I have been working on installing Panda CSS in our repo and upgrading our Design System. It's at times interesting and at times grunt work, but it feels satisfying to get this done. So far it's been going pretty smoothly, but I'll keep you posted!

Tips for big migrations

This Design System upgrade will touch a lot of files in our codebase and before we got started on this work, I had a Big Think about how best to approach this. First of all I thought about whether I could split this huge migration into several smaller steps. I looked at it from all sorts of angles, because if this was possible, it would make this work much less risky and easier to test. Sadly, this turned out not to be feasible and we were going to have to do this in one giant PR, so I had to change tack. My idea was to put two engineers on this work, pairing at all times to avoid the work stalling - with big PRs like this, staleness is your enemy because eventually the merge conflicts will become impossible (or at least very tricky!) to resolve. Having two engineers working on it at once means the context for the work isn't just in one person's head and it means if one of us needs to take a day off, work can continue. The other thing we're hoping to do is have a soft code freeze for a few days while the whole team swarm tests the app and finds any UI bugs and issues. That's for next week - wish me luck!

How to pair effectively

Pairing can be quite draining if you're not careful about it. Being on a multi-hour call, working purely on one thing while someone is watching you type is most people's idea of a nightmare. So how can you make it less painful? A strategy I've used multiple times now that seems to work pretty well is Pomodoro timers. If you're not familiar, the Pomodoro technique is a pretty well known technique for deep focus work - you set a 25 minute timer and only work on one thing for that entire time, then have a five minute break to refresh yourself. My teammate and I applied this to pairing by setting a 25 minute timer, checking in with each other to see whether we were still okay to keep going - if not, we'd have a five minute break and if we were, we'd do another 25 minutes and have a ten minute break afterwards. It meant we were focused for long periods without getting tired and if we were in the middle of a task and in a bit of a flow state, we could continue. I should add that if at any time either of us needed a break, we were able to say so and stop the timer early - this is important, we don't want anyone working beyond their capacity and everyone's capacity for focus is different. So yeah, next time you're pairing, maybe give this a try! It has certainly worked well for me.

Are we forgetting how to CSS?

I was musing on this a fair bit this week due to the work I was doing. A lot of developers these days tend to use their company's design system to implement all of their pages and components. This is mostly a good thing - having a design system implement all the accessibility standards and the latest fancy CSS so you don't have to means a developer can focus on just implementing the feature that's in front of them. However, I have heard lots of folks saying that their CSS just isn't what it used to be, because they're no longer practising those skills actively every day. A lot of developers I speak to are not up to date on grid, let alone newer features like container queries. I must admit, I know about the new CSS features but because I haven't used them in anger, I couldn't tell you how they work either. It's a real shame and I feel like it's a skillset that is slowly being lost, especially when you throw CSS frameworks like Tailwind or even AI into the mix as well. It feels like a bit of a shame to me, but I think I'm an outlier here - I know a lot of people consider CSS esoteric and hard to use, so I'd imagine a lot of folks are relieved they can just outsource that to a design system instead of having to write it themselves. Personally though I think there is something really nice about deeply understanding a specification like grid so that you can make it do what you want to do, rather than fighting with it. So... Go learn grid? Maybe I should do a post about it one day. And on the new CSS features too, given I'm behind on those myself!