Kevin Yank shares the challenges Culture Amp faced when scaling Elm & React with a Design System team in the middle, and how an acquisition tipped the ultimate decision to move Elm from “adopt” to “contain” at the company.

Oh yeah, and there’s a new host, Jared M. Smith...stay tuned for more episodes!

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: elmtown@logisticallyinc.com.

Music by Jesse Moore.

Recording date: 2023.04.06 (07 on Kevin’s side of the world.)

Guest

• Kevin Yank (kevinyank.com)

Show Notes

00:01:03 Some of Kevin’s contributions to Elm

• "Developer Happiness on the Front End with Elm"
• "Elm in Production: Surprises & Pain Points"
• "Elm at Scale: More Surprises, More Pain Points"
• cultureamp/elm-css-modules-loader

00:01:45 History of Elm at Culture Amp

• Elm Town 10 – About being "in production"
• Elm Town 14 – Spotlight on Kevin Yank

00:04:49 "Why didn’t you just…"

• Evan Czaplicki’s talk "The Hard Parts of Open Source"

00:05:54 The exciting challenge: styling Elm

• elm-css-modules-loader

00:10:50 Sharing a design system

00:13:48 Design System team challenges

00:16:30 Acquiring a large React codebase

00:17:24 Upgrading to Elm 0.19

00:19:24 Momentum before the acquisition

00:24:12 Communicating the decision to “contain” Elm

00:32:43 An alternative reality with Elm for Culture Amp

00:42:26 How Elm changed the way that the teams at Culture Amp work

00:44:34 Elm as a secret weapon for recruitment

00:48:00 “Why didn’t you just use web components?”

00:49:25 Kevin's blog post

• On Endings: Why & How We Retired Elm at Culture Amp

00:55:56 Success, or how never adopting Elm at Culture Amp would be worse

00:59:34 Take responsibility for user experiences

• Evan's tweet

01:00:23 Reminiscing on past episodes

• Elm Town 48 - Making Little Games Like Presents
• Elm Town 51 – You went down the well? That’s the cheat way!
• Elm Town 37 - Upgrading to Elm 0.19 with Luke Westby & Richard Feldman
• Elm Town 36 - The Risk of Elm with Dhruv Dang
• …all of them ;)

01:06:15 Elm Radio rocks!

01:08:10 Thanks

• Kevin Yank
• Xavier Ho
• Murphy Randle
• Fergus Meiklejohn
• Former sponsors
• Listeners
• ...and many more