Happy Wednesday!

Today's Issue: Modular monoliths, measuring design system impact, and knowing how you get paid.

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May I Interest You in a Modular Monolith?

So much of frontend platform is trying to wrangle codebases that resemble a "big ball of mud." This could be a great read for you if you've ever caused a regression way over "there" when you changed something over "here." I especially appreciated Maxi's warning about accidentaly turning a monolith from a "ball of mud," to a "distributed ball of mud" which in my experience is significantly worse.

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Visual coverage: Why and How Preply Measures the Impact of the Design System

I actually read this post a few weeks ago, but I can't stop thinking about it. Stefano describes a custom approach he and his team took to measure the design system's visual coverage. His team uses these metrics for a number of purposes:

The Design System team can:

1. Constantly track the outcomes of its initiatives. Please note that visual coverage is not the only metric we use.
2. Identify where Path Design System components are used the most and the least, and work with Product teams to increase the visual coverage. The product teams have: Numbers they can use as OKRs.
3. Straightforward tools to gather the visual coverage in seconds straight where they work: in production, locally, or in Storybook.
4. Straightforward tools to split the ownership of the pages across different teams. Most of Preply.com’s pages are made of components that belong to various teams.

If you've ever been on a design system team that has struggled to measure its impact (and who hasn't), take the time to read through this.

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Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

When you're on a platform team, and especially on a design systems team, your work is not directly tied to dollars earned by the business. That makes it somewhat more difficult to show clear business value. It can also be tempting to do platform work because it "makes the codebase better" without having a very strong business reason.

I thought this post was a great reminder of how important it is to understand how the business works, and to makes sure that all of your works have a clear business impact. It also ties in nicely with Visual coverage: Why and How Preply Measures the Impact of the Design System, since that's a great example of how a design systems team is showing impact.

Around the Web

• Base UI is hiring a design engineer
• JavaScript Records & Tuples proposal has been withdrawn from TC39