Spent 6 hours rebuilding a button component that already existed in our design system

Last Tuesday I found myself rewriting a button component from scratch because nobody on my team knew where the source file lived in our shared library. Turns out the original designer had it buried in an archived project folder from 2021 with completely different naming conventions. Has anyone else wasted a full day recreating something that was already sitting there?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthony16519d ago

Hold on there, I think you're mixing up two different kinds of problems. @ray210 I get what you're saying about kitchen drawers and phone chargers, but a button component in a design system isn't just a random tool you forgot about. It's more like a house key that nobody remembered to put in the labeled drawer because the person who made it left the company. The real issue isn't bad organizing, it's that teams don't have a clear process for keeping shared stuff findable. If you have three screwdrivers, that's on you for buying duplicates. But if your design library has no naming rules or folder structure, then resetting a button is basically guaranteed to happen. Most teams I've seen don't even have a proper inventory of what's in their system, so it's no surprise people rebuild things that already exist.

ray21019d ago

Right? It's like that drawer in your kitchen where you throw all the random tools and then buy a new screwdriver because you forgot you already had three of them in there. We chase the new thing when the old thing is just hiding under a different name or in a place we never check. It's the same with recipes, phone chargers, even friends you haven't talked to in a while. Everything is right there, but we'd rather start over than dig through the mess. Kind of makes you wonder if the real problem isn't the missing stuff, but the way we organize our lives in the first place.