Thomas Gossmann

Unicyclist. Artist. Developer.

Author: Thomas Gossmann

  • Inside Design Tokens: Features

    Features encode user preferences, inherit behavior(s) and are communicated by several principals through agents. Design tokens may or may not support features.

  • Inside Design Tokens: Definitions & Traits

    Over the past three years, I’ve researched design tokens for usage in Theemo and I’m sharing my discoveries in this article series.

  • The Primary / Secondary Naming Controversy in Design Systems

    When researching for my open-source design system hokulea, speaking to designers, or chatting on the design systems slack, it always brings me back to the words primary and secondary. Although I personally don’t like these words, they are kinda like a heavy magnet that draws everybody to use them. The repeated usage of these two…

  • Frontend Component Architecture

    I created this learning resource about the various bits and pieces that are the ingredients to a component architecture. From how they can be used from the outside over how they are working internally to how they can be composed together. I presented this as a talk first at EmberIgnite (an ember mini-conference). Although I…

  • The Hidden Skill and Art of Naming Things

    The two hardest problems in programming are cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one. You learn a lot about algorithms while studying computer science to find clever solutions for the problem at hand – but for naming things? For me undoubtedly this is the hardest problem. In fact, this issue exists in almost every discipline, whether…

  • Ember with Storybook – Behind the Scenes

    Storybook is a system to develop, document and test your frontend components for multiple frameworks and libraries. This post focuses on the integration between storybook and ember. This is the third and final part from Figma to Ember to Storybook series, which I make sure can be read on its own.In this article, I give…

  • Integrate Ember with the JS Ecosystem at the Example of Theemo

    With Ember octane and in combination with recent developments such as ember-auto-import one major issue with ember is greatly fading away. Namely the integration of existing JS libraries in combination with making ember itself use standard javascript language features, most prominent to highlight are native classes over ember object.That also means it’s time to better…

  • Say Hello to Theemo – the Yordle Powered Theme Automator

    Theemo is a javascript library to automate your theme workflow by enhancing your already existing toolchain and connecting multiple tools together.I share the learnings that went into it and tell you what you can use it for. tl;dr: https://gossi.github.io/theemo Learnings Let’s do a time warp how I got here. I started project hokulea, a design…

  • Full Featured Themes in Figma

    The main motor is the idea to establish a workflow from Figma to Ember to Storybook. This article is the first in the series of three yet can be read for itself independently. Shown conventions should also serve the purpose of connecting Figma to other systems.Secondly I wanted to understand the world of design systems,…