Cristiano Rastelli Portfolio Blog
Recently I was part of a panel for the Design NoSite, a three-day virtual event by the Design Org in HashiCorp. The session was about career growth, and I was asked to share my experience as an Individual Contributor (IC) Engineer. So I started to jot down some ideas in a Google Doc, when a [ ]
After five and and a half years, today is my last day working at Bumble (formerly MagicLab, formerly Badoo). It s been a long time, for my standards, and this speaks volumes about how much I loved working for Badoo and Bumble. I am leaving behind a bunch of super-uber-smart people, unforgettable moments, and really good [ ]
I really like this take on what are the barriers to change the status quo, made by Erika Hall in this tweet:
A couple of days ago Jack Franklin, a well-known developer, writer, speaker and more recently podcaster, has written a blog post about writing code comments, explaining how good comments are “about the why, and not the how” and trying to debunk the notion that “code that needs comments is bad code”. I invite you to [ ]
In recent months, I couldn’t help but notice how many people (and companies) when referring to “design tokens” what they actually mean is colors, typography, spacing (and in some cases elevation, timing, and sizing). While this is perfectly true, I think a key part of the picture is missing: design tokens can be much more than this. As Sarah Federman puts it perfectly: In this [ ]
From times to times, it happens to me to have the same conversation around how to fix issues related to technical debt, when there is no time for it . Every time I find myself trying to explain the approach they should use, which is to systematically reduce the debt, slice by slice, piece by piece, [ ]
A few days ago I was writing my bi-annual review, and I was thinking of how I could include some meaningful metrics about the success of our design system in Badoo. It is undeniable that in the last six months Cosmos, the name we gave to it, has gained a lot of traction: everyone is mentioning Cosmos, everyone is starting [ ]
In the last years, I have always made some new year s resolution (here are the ones I made in 2017 and 2018), but strangely enough – at least for me – this year I can t think of anything. More than one people asked me, but I couldn t come up with something even remotely meaningful. According to Wikipedia, a [ ]
This is the second part of a post about the creation of a pipeline that can take a Sketch file and export all the icons included in the file, in different formats, for different platforms, with the possibility of AB testing each icon. You can read the first part of the post here: http://www.didoo.net/2018/12/generating-multi-brand-multi-platform-icons-with-sketch-and-a-node-js-script-part-1/ The…
TL;DR Using a custom build script in Node JS, it is possible to manipulate a series of Sketch files, and then, using an internal Sketch tool, automatically export their assets, to generate multiple icon libraries, for multiple platforms and different brands, that support dynamic colourisation of the assets via design tokens, and also AB testing [ ]
Recently I have come across a tool, called Style Dictionary, developed by Danny Banks at Amazon, that allows you to manage design tokens (or “style properties”) for a design system. I’ve used it to replace the existing tool that we used to process the design tokens for our Cosmos design system. I’ve found the task very interesting, and I’ve [ ]
Yesterday I was trying to solve a problem while building the style guide of Cosmos, the Design System that we have developed in Badoo (you can read more about it here here and here). I was developing a UI component called “Page”. Essentially is the root component of a mobile web application. It has a [ ]
“Why did it took so long?” “Well, because it took so little to the dev before me!” The End Originally published on Medium on March 21, 2018.
A few days ago I came across this lovely quote in a comment to a blog post about change (and why we are so extremely resistant to it). It s from a book, There s a Hole in My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery, written by Portia Nelson, an American popular singer, songwriter, actress, and author. It says a [ ]
This is the story of how a small style guide that was first introduced under the radar, became so appreciated by both developers and designers that it finally became a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. From zero to Cosmos — Part #1From zero to Cosmos — Part #2 Today Fast forward to [ ]
This is the story of how a small style guide that was first introduced under the radar, became so appreciated by both developers and designers that it made its way to become a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. From zero to Cosmos — Part #1From zero to Cosmos — Part #3 The [ ]
This is the story of how a small style guide that was first introduced under the radar, became so appreciated by both developers and designers that it eventually became a complex unification project — a design system called Cosmos. From zero to Cosmos — Part #2From zero to Cosmos — Part #3 As some of you [ ]
Yesterday I was thinking of how often a company “measures” the outcome of an initiative (sponsoring a meetup, supporting an employee’s idea, trying something new, etc.) only as an immediate return of investment. Think of a spreadsheet, in which you have two columns, given and received. The company pays -X and later receives +Y. Accounting 101. “This [ ]
As many other people in the world, every year at the end of December I like to do a personal retrospective of how did things go in the last 12 months (which I usually keep for myself, too personal). I also like to set one or more goals for the upcoming year and share it in [ ]
A few days ago I was attending Clarity Conf in San Francisco. The opening keynote was held by Cameron Moll — Product Design Manager at Facebook — and it was titled “When we align”. It was an interesting talk, though the jet lag was hitting hard on me so I didn’t take any note of [ ]