For the last few years, I've been the team lead for Parchment's Tasty Team. I was brought on as a mid-level developer, and was promoted to senior level after about a year. Around the same time, the team lead promoted into management and asked me to take on the position. During my time as team lead I have emphasized a11y-first development, leading to strong compliance with WCAG and 508 standards well before the 2025 federal mandate was announced.
Parchment and its parent company, Instructure, often buy new companies. While Parchment is a React/NextJS shop, not all of its acquisitions are. So we provided webcomponent implementations of our most important components for visual cohesion and interactivity, with wrappers for Vue, Angular, Ruby, and even Svelte. This helps prevent a repeat of a scenario that we encountered early on where a newly acquired company couldn't interoperate with React and they almost lost a multimillion dollar contract with Deloitte. I knew enough about Ruby on Rails and React to be able to get on a call with the team and figure out a solution in time to save the contract, but it made me realize that it would be a good idea to have a framework-agnostic solution for our most commonly-used components.
My contributions
- Pushed consistency and a11y considerations
- Worked closely with designers to balance developer flexibility vs batteries-included ease of implementation
- Onboarded and mentored junior developers
- Developed analytics and metrics to measure adoption
- Wrote a huge percentage of the components, including a lot of the validation library and extensible theme provider
What's with the name?
The original name was Tastysoft. Apparently it was from an autogenerated chatroom name, and stuck. That was before my time, and I am happy that we decided to truncate the name to just "Tasty."
The Tasty Design System features:
- 508 compliance
- Client-side validation library
- Opinionated design with lots of flexibility
- NextJS-focosed SSR hydration support as well as client-side React
- Full theming system with support for acquired companies to add their own themes as needed
- Office hours and team representation at consumer team planning meetings for "white glove" developer support
And was built with:
- React/typescript
- Storybook
- Lit
