Komodo Design System
Overview
My first ever experience in helping build a real design system was when I was tapped by a small team of designers and developers at Thermo Fisher to help craft components in the Komodo Design System.
Small, unfunded team decides to create a design system in the wee hours
I was approached by a manager in their dev team to see if I had time to code components in the Komodo backlog. They were creating Komodo in their spare time, but were making waves. The company had a common issue with the lack of consistency in design, due to a lack of "one source of truth". It was common to use Bootstrap as the framework, and then designers and dev teams would create assets linked to the specific project they were working on.
My role and what I learned
As I wrote above, I dipped into the backlog and would reference designs to see what the final specs were for the components I was to build. I would write the HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS for the components, test, commit the code to a branch and then do a pull request. My dev colleagues would quality check my code, and approve the merge or send back. Towards the end of my time helping out, design tokens were making a splash. After seeing what they could do, I decided to learn as much as I could about them. It bore many rewards for when I was creating the Aurora Design System.