Hey fam! It’s that time of year, AKA the end of it ;)

Last year I wrote my first year in review and I wanted to continue the tradition this year. The goals I had stated last year were follows:

In 2018, I hope to:

Speak more, hopefully at at least one international conference

Blog more

Focus on my health more (and social life maybe? anyone wanna be friends lol)

Improve my communication skills

and do some more hobby work (psst…you can see my handmade jewelry at https://sarah.jewelry/)

and of course keep improving my technical skills (thank you Front End…

This is a repost of an article written for The Pastry Box.

One of the skills that I’ve found most useful in my career thus far is pattern recognition. The beauty of pattern recognition is that once you’ve cultivated the skill, you can glean insights from almost anywhere, even from unrelated hobbies.

There’s been a lot of conversation happening recently on the language of “making” vs “crafting.” The term “makers” largely seems to apply to male-dominated hobbies and brings to mind STEM ideals, whilst “crafting” is often seen as feminine and domestic in nature. …

This is a repost of an article written for The Pastry Box.

When I was given the opportunity to write for The Pastry Box, the first thing I did was get really freaking excited. The second thing I did is what I normally do when I embark on a new project of any sort: research.

Looking back

I started by looking at older posts from the publication, specifically from 2012–2015 (before this reboot). The posts I saw there were often talking about developing for many devices and screen sizes.

It was the peak of responsive design adoption, and we were really starting…

What’s up, 2018? I see you. Get over here: I’m ready for you.

I had a pretty freaking good 2017, if I do say so myself! It wasn’t all unicorns and cupcakes, but I:

• left LinkedIn where I was a UI engineer, and got a new job at Adobe where I’m a hybrid designer developer on the design systems team
• started focusing on design systems more
• started focusing on accessibility more (and became the first employee to get a11y certified in both design and development)
• did my first tech talks at 1 local meetup, 1 work presentation, 1 tech conference…

Have you all heard of this cool new thing called design systems? They’re popping up everywhere. They’re not really new, but more of a distillation of a lot of things we’ve been starting to do for a long time now. They help us with creating consistency, productivity, and creating better user experiences. Companies are quickly getting behind the benefits that they can bring your teams.

But, design systems have a marketing problem. …