1. Reimagining our Design System

    Reading time: 6 minutes
    Posted 2 years ago

    I work at Jumbo Supermarkten in software engineering. At Jumbo we have a big tech department (affectionately called the Jumbo Tech Campus, or JTC) where we work on all of our digital products: from eCommerce and planning applications to AI driven models for stocking and inventory. I'm going to focus mostly on the eCommerce branch, since this is where we can make a big impact on our customer experience.

    For our tech stack: we have an eCommerce engine which is enriched by (micro) applications and components built in Vue.js and Nuxt.js. There are multiple teams working on fulfilling the eCommerce goals and in order to deliver user interfaces as effectively as possible, we've built a component library that (in general, but we'll get to that) follows the designs and design system.

  2. Career Development in Web Development

    Reading time: 4 minutes
    Posted 2 years ago

    I've been a web developer for over a decade (feel old yet?). Over my career I've gradually moved from an entry level junior at a web agency where I learned not to drop tables, jQuery (yes) and the woes of supporting ie6 even!

    Over the years I've grown in experience and have been focused more on becoming a well rounded frontend specialist, having adopted the Vue.js / Nuxt.js tech stack for the past four years and considered expert enough to been invited to speak at conferences and writing a book.

  3. Getting the first miles in

    Reading time: 3 minutes
    Posted 2 years ago

    I finished the draft of the third chapter today. After some proof reading of my own, it will be off to the editor for the first review. After writing a couple of chapters, it's a good time to do a bit of reflecting on the go.

    I really enjoy writing this sort of content. Having the structure of the entire book laid out beforehand also really helps in making sure that I focus on a specific topic at a time. Without, I think I would be tempted to start drifting off topic by elaborating on more niche or advanced techniques.

  4. Incremental a11y

    Reading time: 5 minutes
    Posted 2 years ago

    I work for a large grocery chain in the Netherlands. We do ecommerce on a national scale: facilitating the ordering and delivery of groceries in the Netherlands. With a large organisation, it any change is not without effort and extensive investment.

    During 2021, an investigation conducted by level-level.com signalled that they were only able to complete 55% of steps from their use case using keyboard and/or screen reader. This meant they were unable to place an order!

  5. Writing the Product Information

    Reading time: 1 minute
    Posted 2 years ago

    I've been working on another starter document, the Product Information piece. This is not necessarily part of the book itself, but is key to the success, since it holds the marketing texts and information.

    This is a bit of a different mindset, because this is about trying to condense the contents of the book (which doesn't exist yet) into enticing commercial texts of varied lengths!

  6. First stage of writing

    Reading time: 2 minutes
    Posted 2 years ago

    This morning I've met with my support team from the publisher. They will help me guide through the process of writing and publishing a book. (Well in all honesty, they are going to do the publishing part. I just have to provide the content).

    This means we passed a couple of steps already. I've signed the agreement to get the whole process in motion. I've even been assigned an ISBN number (life goals 🙌).

  7. I'm writing a book!

    Reading time: 3 minutes
    Posted 2 years ago

    As the great fictional professor Hubert J. Farnsworth said: "Good news everyone!". I'm going to be an author! After a short process of creating an outline and some back and forth between a publisher, I've been given the green light on writing a book on VueJS projects.

    This is something I've never done before. The most writing experience I have so far is writing on my personal website, posting articles on Medium and Dev.to and one publication, which was my sole experience working with an editor.

  8. Astronauts assemble!

    Reading time: 3 minutes
    Posted 2 years ago

    Astro is the new cool kid in town, promising super fast websites with minimum page load. That sounds interesting and Astro has some out of the box improvements that look really promising. So let's discover what the Buzz (all astro related puns are intended) is all about! 👨🏻‍🚀

    Astro is a modern, fast, and lightweight meta framework for building web applications. It is built on top of popular web technologies like React, Vue, and Svelte, and provides a simple, intuitive way to build high-performance web applications.