Hey! Remember 2025? It was doozy. So much, in fact, that I'm only now getting around to recapping it. It feels like still having your Christmas tree up at Easter. At this point, who cares? I'm a completionist at heart, so I couldn't just not do a recap. 50 I turned 50 in 2025 and the day came and went without much fanfare. I didn't feel like making a big deal out of it. People are often surprised…
May 12, 2026 Update: I refactored this to use mask-image instead of background-image so you can control the color of the mask with background-color instead of setting a fill on the SVG to match the surrounding background color. I recently had to add a new variation of a rating component for work and thought I'd share my technique here. (Note that this rating is just for displaying a rating, not…
This year was a tough one. So much so that I almost didn't want to write this post. But I've found writing these to be therapeutic over the years, and a good record of what's going on in my life from year to year. So let's start with the bad. Eldridge E. Scales III April 30, 1975 – April 16, 2024 My best friend passed away. When my birthday rolled around this year I was surprised my friend…
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. I love any excuse to dress up like my favorite characters and eat copious amounts of candy. Ever since high school though, it's been bittersweet. My grandma passed away on Halloween my junior year. And 10 years ago today we lost our daughter, Olivia , just nine weeks after she was born. I prefer to commemorate people's lives on the day they were born…
My birthday was a few weeks ago and I was surprised when my best friend from high school, Eldridge, didn't call me. Even though we don't talk as much as we used to, I could always count on him to call and wish me a happy birthday. Since his birthday is just 10 days after mine, I figured I'd talk to him soon. The night of his birthday, I got sidetracked and didn't want to call him too late, so I…
Working on a design system for a single brand is challenging enough. Eventually, someone will want the design system to support a new product or vertical that deviates from the company's brand. Rather than duplicating a bunch of CSS classes to support this effort, we can use CSS custom properties to override our system's default choices. First, a controversial opinion(?) I've seen a lot of systems…
I'm so ready to turn the page on 2023. While there was a lot to be grateful for this year, it was marred by loss, grief and random health struggles. Loss. In late 2022, our dog Geno started having swelling in his throat that became so severe he wasn't eating. The vet treated him with an injection that reduced the swelling and for a few months he was back to normal. Then in early 2023 the swelling…
Many years ago, before I started specializing in CSS and design systems, I held the job title of Webmaster — managing all aspects of a company's website. So when the Turquoise marketing team asked me to help them build a new website, I was happy to help them out. The challenge was that they wanted it to be a Wordpress site, and I haven't touched Wordpress (or PHP, for that matter) in over a…
It's been nine years since my daughter, Olivia , was born prematurely and I set out on my first Extra Life campaign, playing video games for 24-hours to raise money for Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago, where she was being treated. Olivia passed away less than a week later, a little over nine weeks after being born. We were devastated. I can't even explain how difficult the ensuing years were,…
When many devs think of CSS they think of Peter Griffin trying to open window blinds. But for others CSS is more like putting their hand in the pain box from Dune while some product manager has a gom jabbar to their neck, daring them to pull their hand out. There's a few reasons why tech continues to struggle with CSS. We're bad at teaching CSS. While there are a ton of great CSS practitioners out…
Our hearts are broken. On Thursday night our beloved dog, Geno, passed away. He had been sick for a few months but the last couple of weeks really took their toll on him. Gee-Gee was the best guard dog, an eager snuggler, incredibly patient and gentle with the kids, and integral part of our family. We love him and miss him so much.
My son Ryan recently turned four years old and had a Super Mario-themed birthday. In the past six months or so he's gone from being obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine to becoming obsessed with Mario. He was Mario for Halloween and has Mario-themed bedding topped with a metric ton of Mario plushes, or "stuffies." How did we get here? It all started when he spotted a Nintendo Game and Watch with…
I started my new role as Principal Design Systems Engineer at Turquoise Health just over a month ago and thought it might be useful/interesting to document my process of building a design system from scratch. Design System Deck One of the first things I like to do when starting a new design system is make a Keynote deck about design systems and my approach to building them, as well as my plan for…
Imagine you’re a fan of a professional basketball team. You’ve followed the team for more than a decade, been through ups and downs and, while the team never won a title they were fun to watch and you made a lot of friends, bonding over your shared love of the team. Every now and then a rowdy fan would fan would interrupt the game, often more frequently in specific sections of the arena, but most…
2022 seemed to be the year where things finally started to look up after years of Covid threw everyone's lives through a loop. In last year's recap I listed several things I was looking forward to in the coming year and, much to my surprise, they all happened and then some. Owen in his natural state of chill. Owen. On May 25, our son Owen was born ! We were so blessed to add another healthy baby…
I've been talking with a lot of people about design systems recently. First at Clarity Conference , in New Orleans, where I met a bunch of folks working on design systems big and small. In all of those conversations the one thing that struck me is that none of us have this design systems thing figured out. We're all just kind of stumbling around in the dark, learning from each other's mistakes and…
Dan Mall tweeted some great advice for struggling design systems teams: Do less. Almost every team I work with tries to make their design system do everything. They stress themselves out, trying to tackle too much and end up accomplishing nothing. Pick a handful of things, and do them really well. — Dan Mall (@danmall) November 26, 2022 While attending Clarity Conference a few weeks ago, a…
I'm currently working on a design systems documentation project that has some pretty extensive navigation requirements. The site is built with Eleventy and I wanted to be able to handle the nav menu without needing to update it manually each time I add a new page. It turns out Eleventy has a helpful navigation plugin that's capable of generating a nested list based on the front matter of your…
Three and a half years ago, our son Ryan was born . We decided we wanted another one but weren't really actively trying. If it happened, it happened. And, well, it happened! Owen James Aparicio · born 5/25/22 @ 9:12am, 6lbs 11oz, 20in After the trauma of losing Olivia and trying for four years to have Ryan, and then spending the entire pregnancy anxious about the outcome, this was quite a bit…
It's been about two years since I last rebuilt my blog. Since that time I've learned a lot more about Eleventy and my thinking around design systems and CSS has evolved a bit. My existing codebase had accumulated numerous failed attempts at implementing search, adding a CMS, not to mention all of the abandoned drafts. The features I was able to cobble together were hastily and shamelessly borrowed…
Sifu (PS4/PS5/PC) has already cemented itself as one of my top games of 2022. It's an action-packed, gorgeously-styled love letter to martial arts movies. It's also an extremely challenging game, taking elements of Souls-likes (shortcuts, beefy bosses) and Rogue-likes (permanent upgrades across runs), which can give players who aren't used to these types of games fits when they're expecting more…
I'm still reeling from 2020 and here we are in 2022. It seems as I get older that each year feels simultaneously like the longest and shortest year of my life. 2021 was no exception. I had a particularly hard time thinking of highlights because I feel like I barely left the house. I did manage to come up with a few. Ryan. My son turned two in January and it's been amazing to see him develop his…
There was once a time when I could check out a different video game every few weeks, burn through it, and move onto the next one. These days I find myself playing one or two different games for months on end, grinding out XP and completing daily challenges so I can get a fancy coat of paint for a gun I'll never use or a double XP token I can redeem to get it twice as fast. The whole "games as a…
In 2020 I set an ambitious goal of watching a movie a day for the entire year. I had hoped to watch as many new releases as possible and fill in some gaps in my movie knowledge. I got off to a strong start, staying on pace through most of March. But then the pandemic hit. And while most people would think, "well, at least I have more time to watch movies," it had the opposite effect for me. I…
In my early days at Groupon, after building my first CSS framework for our internal tools, I was tasked with making a new one that would facilitate a redesign of Groupon.com. In a packed conference call with representatives with a half dozen engineering teams, I was asked by a manager three levels above me to cut some corners in order to meet an arbitrary deadline for the project. I argued against…
I was looking for a way to incorporate search into the documentation site for Provi's design system, Fizz, which is built on Eleventy and hosted on Netlify. After lots of Googling and frustrating starts and stops with various solutions, I discovered Algolia's search plugin for Netlify. With it, I was able to set up a pretty robust search feature with autocomplete in a matter of minutes. (Aside…
There's been a convergence of media recently that has me feeling very introspective. Oddly enough, it started with the Disney+ show, Loki , in which Tom Hiddleston's on-again, off-again Marvel villain is yeeted from Earth by the Time Variance Authority. The TVA is responsible for protecting the "Sacred Timeline" from people who might cause deviations from the timeline through the course of their…
I'm really nailing these clickbaity social images. 😎 A few weeks ago a friend of mine, who is a therapist, was lamenting about the fact that she's been paying $60 a month to host her website through one of those companies that offers template websites for professionals. "That's outrageous," I said. "I could move it over to Netlify and you wouldn't have to pay anything." Before I could consider…
Between switching jobs and starting a bunch of side-projects , I've found myself re-writing a lot of CSS in the past year. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, if I could just write one CSS framework and use it on any project? cool.css is my attempt to do just that. Just what the world needs—another fucking CSS framework! Yes, I know. I feel the same way. Dave Rupert once advocated for tiny Bootstraps,…
I probably don't have to go into great detail about all the ways 2020 sucked. We've all been doomscrolling together, struggling to get through it in our own ways, hoping that a return to some semblance of normalcy was around the corner, only for a bunch of selfish, mask-less dipshits to prolong it even further. A lot of people said that each day of the pandemic felt like the movie Groundhog Day,…
In the early 2000s, the Call of Duty series was just one of many first-person shooters set in World War II. The fourth installment, however, took the franchise to a whole new level and helped make Call of Duty a fixture of pop culture and one of the top selling franchises of all time. 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the first of the series to be set in modern times. It had you jumping…
One month from today I'll be participating in my SEVENTH Extra Life , a 24-hour gaming marathon supporting local children's hospitals. Last year we raised a record $5,120 for Lurie Children's Hospital here in Chicago. To date, thanks to the generosity of people like you, we've raised over $20,000 to help sick kids. Extra Life is a charity that is dear to my heart. In 2014, my daughter Olivia was…
Last year, I reminisced about my time at Groupon , and wondered what might be next. It's been over eight and a half years since I started at Groupon and today was my last day. While I was never incredibly enthusiastic about internet coupons, I was fortunate to work with so many talented, generous and fun people in my time at Groupon. It's really because of them that I stuck around for so long, and…
A few weeks ago we had a one-day hackathon at Groupon called Simple Groupon . The basic theme was to work on projects that simplified our processes and tools internally or simplified our customers' experience. I decided it would be a great opportunity to demonstrate the power of our new Groupon Design System to the broader engineering organization. With our current process, implementing visual…
If you're not one of the 13+ million people playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons , surely you know someone who is. The game is so popular that Nintendo Switches are nearly in as much demand as COVID-19 test kits. At first glance, Animal Crossing looks pretty childish. I'll admit I was initially reluctant to even read about it, much less buy it. But peer pressure finally got to me and I quickly…
I've been kicking around a few ideas for posts recently, but it seemed a little bit silly to be writing about CSS or video games when the world is in the midst of a pandemic. For several weeks now, (what is time anymore?) we've all been under stay-at-home orders, maintaining social distancing and generally trying not to lose our collective shit as COVID-19 has spread throughout the world. At the…
I recently received an email from PlayStation detailing my gaming "accomplishments" of 2019. This email laid bare the ridiculous amount of time I spent playing video games on just one of the platforms I play on, PlayStation 4. I'm embarrassed to admit exactly how much time it was. It got me thinking of ways I could better use my time or devote it to other hobbies. Cruel, but fair, PlayStation.…
Where 2018 seemed to last an eternity , 2019 just whizzed on by. It was a pretty good year! Here are some of the highlights: Ryan We had a baby! Ryan Wyatt Aparicio was born on January 31, 2019. He is just the best. Such a fun, chill baby. Everyone who meets him is amazed how calm he is. And those cheeks. The first thing out of people's mouth is always, "LOOK AT THOSE CHEEKS!" It's been a…
For the last five years, I've been participating in Extra Life to raise money for Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago. My daughter, Olivia , was born prematurely around that time and was being treated there. Extra Life was an opportunity to help kids at Lurie while doing something I love — playing video games — for 24 hours straight. Olivia passed away just days after my first Extra Life…
Netflix's Dark , which recently premiered its second season, answers the important question, "what if Stranger Things , but good?" Just judging by Dark's first season trailer, the German series seems to share a lot in common with its more well known Netflix cousin. They certainly seem to share a lot of of the same DNA: a missing child, a mysterious vibe, a 1980s aesthetic. But where Stranger…
Recently, I was tasked with taking a very data-heavy site designed for desktop and making it responsive. I love challenges like this because it gives me the opportunity to show people who think that not every site/app works on mobile that they are wrong. (And what's more fun than showing people they're wrong?) It also reminded me of the old CSS Zen Garden, since I couldn't update the markup and…
Caring for my infant son has started to get me thinking about what's next in my career. This October will mark my eighth year at Groupon. And as much as friends and family hear me make snarky jokes about the ol' coupon factory, it really has been good to me. After years of being the lone "web guy" at various small companies, Groupon took a chance on me as a UI engineer. I started out working on a…
I had all sorts of grand plans for how I was going to spend my time productively during my paternity leave, which ended today. I would organize my online photos, work on my slides for an upcoming talk, write a bunch of blog posts and, I dunno, maybe spend time with my wife and newborn son. But all of that went out the window (mostly) when I became hooked on Slay the Spire . Slay the Spire has been…
The Battle Royale genre is the latest craze in gaming and I'm pretty sure I hate it. For the uninitiated, in a Battle Royale game, a large number of players (typically 60-100) are dropped onto an island with nothing but their fists. Upon landing, there is a mad scramble to scavenge weapons, armor and equipment in order to survive. A circle contracts the play area, causing fatal damage to players…
Last year I started blogging again after a four year absence. One of the reasons I was able to start writing again was the fact that my wife, Allie, was pregnant. We kept it pretty quiet given all that we had gone through since losing our daughter, Olivia. If I had my way, we would have dropped the news like a Beyoncé album: hey, we have a new baby coming out, oh, and here he is. Ryan Wyatt…
I've been listening to podcasts regularly for over twelve years now, and my favorite one, The Slashfilmcast, just released its 500th episode. I remember tuning in to the very first episode in May of 2008 as they reviewed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Even though the movie was terrible, I really enjoyed the rapport between the hosts, Dave Chen, Devindra Hardawar, Adam Quigley…
As I've gotten older, each year seems to just fly by. 2018, on the other hand seemed like the longest year of my life. Some highlights: I found out that I'm part Chinese. I did the 23andMe test and was surprised to learn just how diverse my genetic makeup is Besides my broad European ancestry, I'm 20% East Asian and Native American. Half being indigenous Peruvian, I'm assuming, and the other half…
I've spent the last month stressing over what to write here. Would it be another four years before I wrote another post? Should I write about how obsessed I've been with Destiny lately? My love/hate relationship with NBA 2k? Something about the Bulls? "Oh, I know - HOW ABOUT NOTHING?," my brain responds. But then this tweet yesterday inspired me. I shared some principles behind my process: 1.…
Working on a design system at a large company, I've noticed that depending on who you ask, they think the design system is something different. It's like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Source: Wikipedia If you ask a designer, they'll say, "the design system is the UI kit!" If you ask a developer, they'll say, "the design system is the component library!" If you ask a third person,…
Hey there. It's been awhile. Almost four years, to be exact. I've wanted to write you for some time but I couldn't bring myself to do it until now. It felt awkward to just resume writing after so much time away without addressing the elephant in the room. Olivia Four years ago today, my daughter Olivia was born. It should have been a happy occasion, only she wasn't due until mid-December. My wife,…