Mark Dalgleish

In a world of components, how should our design processes change? How should our tooling change? How should we, as front-end developers, better enable this change?

In a world of components, how should our design processes change? How should our tooling change? How should we, as front-end developers, better enable this change? 

In this talk, we’ll look at the current state of design and development, and where we could go if we’re willing to push for it.

2020

ReactConf AU

Rethinking Design Practices

Thanks to modern component-oriented architectures, the front-end community has been naturally gravitating towards design systems as a way of standardising our respective design languages into reusable components. 

When done successfully, it suddenly becomes trivial to translate standard designs into code. In fact, we may even find that this translation step starts to feel somewhat redundant. 

In a world of components, how should our design processes change? How should our tooling change? How should we, as front-end developers, better enable this change? 

In this talk, we’ll look at the current state of design and development, and where we could go – if we’re willing to push for it.

2019

ReactiveConf

Thanks to React's component-oriented architecture, the React community has been naturally gravitating towards design systems as a way of standardising our respective design languages into reusable components. When done successfully, it suddenly becomes trivial to translate standard designs into code. 

In fact, we may even find that this translation step starts to feel somewhat redundant. In a world of components, how should our design processes change? How should our tooling change? How should we, as React developers, better enable this change? In this talk, we'll look at the current state of design and development, and where we could go—if we're willing to push for it.

React Amsterdam

Designing with React

Keeping developers and designers in sync is an ongoing challenge for our industry, with each discipline working in completely different mediums. In the past few years, we've seen mass adoption of component systems with locally-scoped styles, which has led directly to the emergence of tools like react-sketchapp and html-sketchapp that allow us to generate static design assets from real production code. Now, we're beginning to see a real feedback loop from development back into design—but what does this mean for traditional design processes? What does this mean for the future of front-end development? In this talk, Mark began to answer these questions by running through a real-world example of this technique, had a closer look at how it all works, and showed you how you can start experimenting with this yourself.

2018

Sketching in the Browser

Ask Me Anything session, moderated by Gerard Sans.

AMA with Mark Dalgleish

Ask Me Anything session, moderated by Gerard Sans. Based on Mark's previous talk.

React played a pivotal role in the widespread emergence of universal/isomorphic apps, rendering on both the server and client. However, many applications continue to render purely on the client, and for good reason—running a React server in production doesn't come without significant challenges. Typically we find ourselves having to choose between these two competing approaches, but there's a lesser-known third option—using React to pre-render our sites at build time, whether partially or fully. In this talk we'll cover why you'd want to do this in the first place, and how modern tooling can help us achieve it.

2016

The Universality of Static Sites

With the push towards writing CSS in JavaScript within the React community, CSS Modules have suddenly emerged as a surprisingly popular alternative that still allow us to maintain our connection with the CSS community. 

Do we have to give up writing CSS in JavaScript? Are we clinging to the past, or do CSS Modules offer a new way forward for the entire web community? In this talk we'll examine both the history and potential future of CSS Modules, and hopefully inspire the next generation of styling in React.