Work

A screenshot of a concept for how status could be applied to issues

Issue Status

Helping engineers find errors in their code.

The Sentry logo
Sentry is an error monitoring service and it’s pretty magic when you get a notification about your code breaking in the latest release.
A list of old issues in the Sentry app
But larger engineering teams had to scroll through an endless list of old issues, just to find relevant issues to them.
A screenshot of all the Ignore actions available for an issue
Triaging was also overwhelming and since customers just wanted to dismiss an issue until it gets significantly worse — why couldn’t we automate this?
I started brainstorming with design lead Dora Tamsen and her take was that we needed to focus on the lifecycle of an issue: how can we clearly describe changes to an issue over time?
A diagram showing how an issue changes status over time
New, Ongoing, Escalating, and Archived: with these statuses we could automatically detect when an issue gets worse and prioritize new problems.
If we could detect when an issue was escalating then we could also auto-archive issues after 14 days, getting all those old issues out of the way for customers.
A screenshot of the issues table with the archive button and proper statuses added to each issue.
After pitching the project to leadership and then a couple of months of engineering, issues were suddenly labelled by their status. No more hodge-podge of confusing actions and old, irrelevant issues!
A screenshot of a concept for how status could be applied to issues
Finally, I made concepts for how to sort and prioritize issues too, exploring how the severity and assignee of an issue could be included in the sort as well.
A screenshot of the new Gusto homepage after the rebrand

Gusto

Designing a design system.

In 2018, the team at Gusto started work on a rebrand. This was exciting news because it was an opportunity to tackle our inconsistent design patterns and accessibility problems across our web app.
A screenshot of a document I wrote to convince design leadership to hire UI engineers. It worked!
So I panic-petitioned leadership to hire a dedicated design systems team and, thankfully, my pitch paid off — we hired two amazing UI engineers who quickly became my mentors.
An example of our form components, in the new Gusto style
The design team had provided a few hints about how the brand might apply to the app but we started with the most common components first: forms, breadcrumbs, navigation, typography.
We then went component-by-component to figure out how the system should work together in an updated version of our UI Kit.
table.big-table {
  tr.big-table-row td.cell {
    /* eternal screaming */
  }
}
Tables are vital for Gusto customers and unfortunately they had accessibility problems, multiple conflicting components, and thousands of lines of unnecessary CSS. So we dedicated quite a bit of time to consolidating them, too.
We shipped neat typographic improvements, such as using tabular numerals in tables — important details when customers are scanning row after row full of tax breakdowns and financial information.
The year before I refactored our typography system so that we had sensible defaults for h1, h2, h3, etc. and this ended up paying off in a big way: all we had to do was plug in the new fonts.
We often collaborated with other teams to extend our component library and built components like this one that helped internal Gusto employees onboard large customers.
A screenshot of the Figma Design Systems publication website were they rather kindly let me write something about design systems and newsletters
Our weekly newsletter kept folks up to date on our work and this helped foster a sense of community. Here’s a thing I wrote for Figma around this time about how newsletters can help design systems work.
A screenshot of the new Gusto homepage after the rebrand
Ultimately I’m real proud of raising the bar for accessibility in the app and reducing the number of confusing, duplicate components that had developers scratching their heads. But I’m also proud of the team; we made our interface 1% better each day and built great foundations for the future.
A screenshot of the CSS-Tricks homepage

CSS-Tricks

Staff writer for the best website ever made.

The CSS-Tricks logo
CSS-Tricks is a popular front-end website by Chris Coyier and in 2014 I joined the team to write about the latest developments in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
A screenshot of the CSS-Tricks website showing the first article I wrote
How to redirect a web page was the first piece I wrote and it was completely terrifying. I’d never written anything that required careful step-by-step instructions before but thankfully Chris was the best mentor; his guidance was sharp and funny and kind.
A grid of articles that I’ve written over the years
Over the years I wrote about a wide range of topics; from design systems best practices, to the tiniest CSS curiosity.

See the Pen Background blend mode by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

I also learned how to play with CSS, like in this demo I made about chaining multiple blend modes.

See the Pen backdrop-filter demo by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

There’s a lot of concepts in CSS that are hard to grok with words alone, and so experimenting with these CSS properties in Codepen became real important. Here’s another demo about the backdrop-filter property that made it click for me.
Screenshot of the email newsletter we sent out each week
Each Sunday I also wrote the newsletter that went out to more than 90,000 readers at one point. It was a great place to summarize all the drama in the front-end world and experience writing on a tight deadline.
When Chris sold CSS-Tricks to Digital Ocean in early 2022, I wrote a piece about what those eight years meant for me, and left shortly after since the timing felt right. But—dang—what a ride. I couldn’t be happier with the opportunity to write alongside such a great team of writers and editors.
A screenshot of Marcin and I laughing at some nerdy book thing

Shift Happens

An interview with Marcin Wichary about his book.

A photograph of Marcin’s beautiful book — Shift Happens
Shift Happens is a book about keyboards and, for the launch of his Kickstarter, I was lucky enough to interview Marcin. My role here was just to ask the questions, look handsome, and gasp at how punk rock his book had become after all these years. Watch the interview.