Finally compared our old style tiles to a real component library and wow.

We spent like 8 months passing around style tiles in PDFs for our e-commerce platform, and every developer interpreted the spacing differently. Last week I built out a tiny component library in Storybook with just 12 buttons and 3 card variants as a test. The difference was night and day. Our junior dev put together a new product page in 2 hours instead of 2 days because he didn't have to guess padding or hover states. The QA team caught zero visual bugs on that page, which is a first for us. Has anyone else noticed how much time gets wasted just clarifying "is this button 8px or 12px from the edge?" all the time?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancy33d ago

Wendy's right that our senior dev still overrides half our button styles with inline CSS.

wendy_clark3d ago

Spending 2 days on a single product page sounds like a training issue not a component library issue. 12 buttons and 3 card variants is barely anything. Your junior dev could have just copied the CSS from the last working page and tweaked the padding. I've seen teams blow weeks on component libraries that end up getting ignored by senior devs who still write custom styles anyway. A 2 hour page isn't that impressive when the actual complex checkout flow is still a mess of spaghetti code. QA catching zero bugs probably means they just didn't look hard enough or the page was too simple to test.

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