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1. Context & Problem

I chose to build my 2025 portfolio in React, and reflecting on my 10 years of development experience, I decided to tackle three recurring challenges:

  • Inconsistent UI — Developers often re-implemented common components like buttons, modals, and accordions, leading to design drift.

  • Reduced productivity — Duplicate code, common in many projects, slows down development and increases maintenance overhead.

  • Accessibility gaps — Accessibility is now a business requirement. Embedding WCAG standards directly into library components proactively reduces compliance risks.

xxx — to highlight inconsistency
📸 Case Study 1: Maintaining visual consistency by reusing a single master component across multiple contexts—like banners, cards, and tiles—with optional customizations.

During my years as a front-end developer for large companies, I witnessed the challenges that come with scaling applications: increased user experience complexity, longer development cycles, and more onboarding time for new engineers.

2. Solution

I designed and built a React component library to centralize and standardize reusable UI elements. More importantly, I was committed to enterprise-grade quality, ensuring that the library was not just functional, but scalable and impactful.

I framed the project around key goals, each directly mapped to a business outcome:

  • Reusability & scalability → Reduced duplicated code and enabled faster feature development.

  • Visual & functional consistency → Strengthened brand identity and improved user trust.

  • Easy integration + clear documentation → Lowered onboarding time for developers and accelerated adoption.

  • WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance → Improved inclusivity and minimized accessibility-related risks.

  • Responsiveness → Delivered seamless user experiences across devices.

  • Performance → Improved load times and UI responsiveness for better customer satisfaction.

  • Reliability through unit testing → Reduced production bugs and improved overall product reliability.

🎥 An interactive catalog of all components, searchable and organized in Storybook. This streamlines the design-to-development handoff and ensures everyone is using the correct, latest versions.

3. Implementation

I built the library on top of Carbon Design Systems, chosen for its sleek, minimalist, and enterprise-focused design principles. This ensured that the components would not only look consistent but also align with enterprise-grade usability and accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA). I also selected a stack that reflects my ambitions to build scalable, production-ready solutions:

  • Tech Stack: React, TypeScript, Next.js, Storybook, Jest

  • Design System: Carbon Design Systems (components, tokens, types, etc.)

  • Architecture: Published as a standalone npm package and integrated seamlessly into the main application

  • Developer Tools: Storybook (as a living style guide), GitHub Actions (for CI/CD)

Example: CustomTile Component

I designed the CustomTile component to address the common trade-off between presenting data clearly and providing actionable user interfaces. This reflects my solution engineering approach: solving not only for UI aesthetics but also for usability, scalability, and business impact.

🎥 Demonstrating the 'CustomTile' component in Storybook: interactively exploring its variants, verifying its responsiveness, and finally viewing it in the live app context.

Features:

  • Multiple variants: Banner and Card

  • Media display: Image or icon (optional)

  • User interactions: Supports routes, links, and modal windows

  • Flexible configuration: Fully configurable via props, with documented usage in Storybook

4. Impact

✨ Business + Technical Outcomes:

After piloting the library with a group of consumer developers who integrated it into their local apps and tested multiple use cases, I gathered the following results:

  • 30% faster feature development due to readily available reusable components.

  • Consistency across the app, significantly reducing design drift.

  • Improved onboarding, enabling new developers to become productive more quickly.

These results validated that the library was not just a technical improvement but a business-enabling solution.

5. Solution Engineering Mindset

This project wasn’t just about UI components — it was about delivering a solution with measurable impact:

  • Business Alignment: Faster time-to-market for features.

  • Collaboration: Partnered with designers and product owners to align with design and UX goals.

  • Scalability: Built as a foundation for a broader design system.

  • Enablement: Packaged + documented for easy adoption across projects.

🎥 Case study 1: Showcasing the end-to-end integration: the library is consumed as an NPM dependency, its components are imported into a React application, and they instantly provide consistent, production-ready UI.

6. Commitment to Quality

The library is currently in a stable beta release. My commitment to enterprise-grade quality includes:

  1. Performance benchmarking

  2. Comprehensive unit test coverage ahead of its planned v1.0 release

✨ Takeaway:

This project demonstrates my ability to identify inefficiencies, design scalable solutions, and deliver measurable business value — the same skills I aim to bring to a Solution Engineer role.

7. Your feedback matters

I'd love to get your feedback. What use cases would you use a component like this for? Check out the links below to explore the Storybook prototype and let me know your thoughts: