Lessons Learned Building a Reusable Component Library by Michael Thiessen

We’ve spent the last 1.5 years building a reusable component library in Vue, and it’s been a key factor in rewriting our frontend to Vue. Devs don’t have to spend as much time worrying about CSS or making sure to adhere to the design system, Construction Yard takes care of that for them. I want to share some of the most important lessons we’ve learned in building our library (which is continually evolving). Some of my ideas are:
- Getting buy-in from the rest of the company
- The unexpected benefits of a component library
- The 3 different phases of maturity our library has gone through
- How to allocate time to it when everyone is busy building features (using a “virtual team”)
- What our process looks like, or, “how to move fast without breaking too many things”
- Custom tooling we’ve built to make our lives easier: automatically generated stats on component usage, live documentation for each branch, scripts for versioning, etc.
I’m sure there are other lessons that will come to mind in the next few months. I hope to make this talk as value-packed as I can.