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Notes on UX engineering, design systems, and shipping the gap between Figma and production.
Notes on UX engineering, design systems, and shipping the gap between Figma and production.
Career · 9 min read
Close ✕Nov 2024
The honest version of this story is messier than most "how I learned to code" posts. There was no bootcamp, no clear turning point, no moment I decided to make the switch. There was just a problem I kept running into — and a slow realisation that I needed different tools to solve it.
I was a Product Designer at a company where handoff was a real friction point. I'd spec a component, write detailed notes, annotate the interaction states — and what would ship was subtly, consistently, frustratingly different. Not wrong. Just not right.
The engineers weren't bad. The process wasn't broken. The gap was in communication. I was describing interfaces in a language that was one step removed from what actually gets built.
"I didn't want to become an engineer. I wanted to close the gap between what I designed and what users actually experienced."
I didn't start with a curriculum. I started with a component I'd designed that I wanted to understand. I built it in HTML and CSS — badly at first, then less badly. Then I broke it trying to add a hover state, which sent me down a rabbit hole about CSS specificity that I've never fully escaped.
The order I learned things was dictated by the problems I was trying to solve, not by what a course thought I should learn next. That meant a lot of gaps, a lot of Stack Overflow, and a weirdly deep understanding of things I'd stumbled into by accident.
Building things I already had opinions about. When you have a design intuition about a component, you notice when the implementation doesn't feel right — and that noticing drives you to understand why.
React was the turning point. Not because it's the best framework (debates welcome), but because component thinking mapped directly onto how I already thought about design: reusable pieces, props as configuration, state as the source of truth for UI decisions.
I didn't announce a career change. I just started doing both — contributing to design reviews and to code reviews. The first time I submitted a PR that got merged, it wasn't a big moment. It was just... normal. Which is exactly what I'd been trying to make it.