Mastering Design Systems with Jeremy Butler

Hi, everyone.

So my name is Jeremy Butler.

I'm the product design lead at Laravel, and I take care of a lot of the evolving design systems and kind of the design direction for Cloud, Nightwatch, and Forge, and a little bit around, you know, the Laravel brand as well.

Okay.

And I have so many questions, in part because I've actually seen your fingerprints on quite a bit of open source things, so I'm curious, like, where that-

Okay

...

but, but before we do that, you know, the first question we have to ask is what is the story of you coming to work at Laravel? So what...

You know, go as far back as you want or keep it as short, but I, I want a story that ends up in you've signed a contract and you're working there on your first day.

Okay.

So we have to go back maybe eight or nine years-

Okay

... 'cause that's where, really where the story begins.

So I've worked with Philip Harton, who's our-

Yeah

... senior PM here at Laravel, almost for 10 years, and the first project that we were working on together was distress media, so selling adverts to pretty big companies for print, for, like, outdoor advertisement, and we decided to build it in the system that we knew, which was WordPress, and WordPress came out in 4.7 with an API.

And we thought, "Okay, this is gonna be it.

This is how we build our first application together" but immediately started hitting problems.

We had performance problems, authentication problems, just all sorts of issues all the way down, full downstream effect.

And Phil went away, and he bought a book called Laravel Up and Running-

[laughs]

... which, of course, is your book.

So all of this is-

[laughs]

... comes back to you.