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Gatsby Days Video: Building Design System Documentation with Gatsby

Michelle Gienow
July 14th, 2020

After much thought and discussion, the Gatsby team has decided not to hold Virtual Gatsby Days in the way we originally planned. While we were very much looking forward to our first digital community gathering, we feel now is not the time to take attention and space away from the Black Lives Matter movement.

Transforming Gatsby Days from a live event into a content series keeps the focus on more important events while sharing the amazing speakers and learning opportunities in a way the community can access when the time is right for each of us. All of the product and program announcements planned for Gatsby Days have been rolled up into an initial blog post, and now we are following with a video series to present the speakers who had been scheduled to share their knowledge during the event. We hope you enjoy. 💜

We look forward to seeing you at our next Gatsby Days, planned for October, though it’s difficult to say right now exactly what form that will take. Follow Gatsby on Twitter to keep up with announcements around our fall Gatsby Days planning, calls for proposals, when registration starts, and other developments.

Great documentation empowers your users and helps newcomers familiarize themselves with your process. Unfortunately, doing documentation right — and keeping docs current and accurate — is a lot of work. Design systems in particular depend on solid documentation because the entire process is built around consistency, reusability and scalability. If the documentation falls down, the design system is likely to follow.

Adekunle Oduye’s presentation shows how to use Gatsby as the foundation for creating living documentation for your design system. Adekunle is a design systems advocate and Senior UX Engineer for Mailchimp who in dedicates his spare time to Code Cooperative, teaching programming skills to people who have been affected by the justice system.

Check out the source code for Adekunle’s Gatsby Days Reconfigured presentation on creating a design system starter for Gatsby + Storybook, ideal companions for creating a living documentation system. Writing the docs in MDX with Gatsby means making code the source of truth — and making writing documentation a part of the development process, rather than an afterthought. When documentation is a living part of your code, it’s front of mind to keep it current. Systemizing the documentation process increases efficiency and productivity, and Adekunle demonstrates a practical path to get it done fast with a Gatsby starter, using Gatsby for the code and Storybook for the UI!

Find Adekunle’s presentation slides on his website, Adekunleoduye.com. Find him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter @AdukunleOduye to read more of his thoughts on design systems, UI animation and new frontiers in front end development.

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Writes things @ GatsbyJS. Chaotic good frontend dev, caffeine addict, backyard chicken wrangler 🐓.

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