Work · XP Inc.
Soma, XP’s design system
Multi-theme, technology-agnostic and multi-platform. I was Soma’s technical lead in 2020, and it launched publicly in a live session in February 2021.
- Role
- Software Architect and Design Ops Tech Lead
- When
- 2020 – 2022
- Stack
- Design system · Design ops
Three requirements
- Multi-theme: one set of components, many brands and themes, without forking code.
- Technology-agnostic: components do not depend on the consumer’s framework.
- Multi-platform: the same design decisions reach every surface that uses them.
Choosing the right tool
No tool was a 100% fit. Before deciding, I wrote bradom: six rendering strategies, from naive innerHTML to a Virtual DOM and tagged template literals, to understand what each one costs. In the end I chose a technology that was not my own. The prototype existed to make the decision.
Launch
Soma was presented to the public in a launch live session on February 11, 2021. The same years at XP produced two other pieces of infrastructure: Arsenal, for micro-frontends, and Chameleon, for theming web components.