Talk
Bulletproof Design Systems
The hardest part of Design Systems is neither the coding nor the deploying; it’s the adoption. Encouraging teams to use it and to integrate it as part of their workflow is no easy task and it is the key to avoid the dreaded “Failure of the Design System”. In this talk, we are going to explore multiple tools and strategies that will help you and your teams increase the adoption of your design system across your company. From simplifying testing, to smooth implementation and maintenance. Join us to make your design system truly bulletproof.
Bio
Eva Ferreira is a Front-end engineer and professor. She currently works as a UI Lead Developer and has been teaching web technologies at the National Technological University of Argentina for more than ten years.
Throughout her career Eva has been deeply involved in the Argentinian web community. She enjoys giving workshops and talks and since 2015 she has been organizing CSSConf Argentina, an international non-profit event that brings experts from all around the globe to speak about web technologies.
In her spare time she loves reading about CSS, creating animations and playing with her cats.
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Interview
Hello, everyone. I'm so excited to be joined by my friend Eva Ferreira, you can see. Yeah, that's good. Oh, man. I have a hard time saying people's names sometimes. I'm really sorry, Eva. Maybe
you can correct us. Eva is going to be speaking at Epic Web Conf 2025 about bulletproof design systems, which I'm very excited about. Eva and I met years ago at Infobip in Croatia,
lovely conference, really enjoyed that. And Eva is a lovely person. So I want you to get to know her. Eva, could you introduce yourself to us? Of course. Nice to meet you again. I'm Eva Ferreira. Don't worry if you're going to pronounce my surname. I'm sorry.
Double R is kind of impossible for English speaking people. I don't know why. I am basically right now working as a tech lead at a company called Mable, which is a QA low-code automation
tool. I have had the fun of experimenting with projects such as localization, onboarding, like doing the whole demo experience. And right now I'm happily working on a very challenging
role-based access model project. Outside of my everyday job, I do enjoy education a lot. I have been teaching for, I think, more than 10, 12 years at the National Technological University of Argentina and in different boot camps about how to do web development.
And last but not least, I used to organize CSSConf Argentina back before COVID and live things. So we did two editions back in 2016 and 2018. So that's me.
Oh, that is great. That's a lot of stuff going on. So you know the struggle of organizing events and getting people together and everything, that can be a challenge. Why do you put forth the effort to organize when you did and also to go to conferences in person? You're coming
from a long ways away. It's a long flight and it takes a lot of effort to prepare the talks and everything. What is it about meeting in person that is so worth it for you?
Yeah, well, it's a mix of many reasons. On one hand, when we organized CSSConf Argentina, it came a lot from the need to have a place in Latin America where we show that we have
wonderful engineers all over. And we made a very, very large effort on making sure that we could show the Latino speaker and not just United States or Europe. So we were very mindful of
trying to have the conference be in a space where you could see yourself as a speaker. So you could say, okay, next time I can do that too because that's someone like me on the stage. And then I kept on doing conferences and talk at conferences mostly because I enjoy,
I'm very passionate about talking about things that I love like design systems. But also when it comes to in person and virtual, if we talk about post COVID and all that, I had experience
with those, both in teaching and in speaking. And there is nothing like in person, especially for someone who has some hard time focusing on things sometimes. When I stay at home and I try
to kind of watch a video or be on a conference online, I just drift off. It's like, oh, look, my cat is doing this or my cat is doing that. Or my mom is coming for dinner. What should I cook?
And my mind goes everywhere. It's like, oh, I have to work on that Shira ticket that has been in triage for two weeks. And then I open VS Code and I begin coding and the video ends up in the background. I totally forget about that. So in person, besides meeting people, which is amazing
and creates a lot of valuable relationships, it allows me to stay focused and enjoy the day and learn and really be there in person and focus on that moment.
Yeah, I think that is underappreciated and honestly takes a little bit of self-awareness that that is a struggle that we all have. How many of us have bought a course and then never
finished it? There's a level of accountability that you get when you're there in person. And that's like the thing that you're doing. So it's easier to focus on that education aspect. In addition to all of the benefits of developing professional relationships and things like that,
too. Yeah. So I appreciate you for being part of that education aspect that we're going to have at Epic Web Conf and with especially with your experience and at your QA automation
company. I think that helping us understand how to build design systems that people actually use is going to be really beneficial. Something that I did when I was at PayPal and that was a big
challenge was like, you build the thing, will they come? Maybe not. So I appreciate that. Can you tell us a little bit more about what your talk Bulletproof Design Systems is all about? Of course. So it's all about answering the question, why do design systems fail?
And taking a look at different reasons that can appear at the very beginning of the design system or perhaps once the design system is ongoing and people are using it as they should. So we will be talking about who are the users of the design system, what's the best way to
begin working on the design system? And then we will also talk about maintaining it, which I think is one of the most important parts, because you don't want to be the only person who like I create the design system and I maintain it and then that's the only thing that I do.
You want other folks to collaborate and to add to that. So we will be talking about that, how to maintain, how to prove its value, how to measure the success of the design system. So you can actually go into your boss, your tech lead, your managers and say,
we need to invest here because it's valuable and you can show the data and prove that it has actually been successful and that it has been proven to improve the quality of the website, improve the efficiency of your engineers. So we will be going through all of that and hopefully
making everybody's design system successful. Yeah, I think it's easy for us to kind of glaze over our failures sometimes and on social media we often just share the success. I wonder if actually maybe that's shifting a little bit. People seem to be feeling a little bit more
comfortable sharing their failures, but I always admire when people do that because it's actually really helpful to hear about people's failures and what they learned from those experiences and then from that we can hopefully succeed the next time. So all of your experience is
going to be very helpful to us in building design systems that are successful. So Eva, when we're at the conference we've got people who are, we have these extended breaks and the point is so that people can meet each other and network and talk and all of that.
Let's imagine that there's somebody who sees you down the hall and they're like, oh, I want to talk to Eva. What's something that they could bring up that would really get you talking, really get you excited? Well, everything UI, CSS, accessibility,
design systems will make me extremely happy, but I think I can definitely add, as you say, failures, like tell me your story of when something went wrong and what you learned from it. When something went wrong and what you learned from it. I think it's extremely important that we
accept that we make mistakes and own them and learn from them and make sure that the next time we make a mistake it's a different one because we cannot avoid making mistakes, but we can definitely try to make new ones along the way. So those are the stories. I love that kind of thing. Your story
about your design system, whether it went well or not. I would very much appreciate if people come and speak about that. Perfect. I think that there will be plenty of people who would love to
chat with you about that and also just to get to know you in general because you're just a lovely person with a really awesome experience. And I imagine actually there are probably some people who are also currently working on some sort of authentication, authorization, RBAC sort of thing
right now. And you can commiserate together and maybe that'll make each other feel better. Yes, definitely. Well, it's a super honor. Is that the way you would say that? It's an honor
to have you come out to Utah for Epic Web Conf. I'm really excited to have you. I was very excited to see your submission. I think that it's going to be really great for people to see. So thank you, Eva, for putting all the work into making it awesome and I'm looking forward to seeing you in March.
Thank you so much. See you. Bye, everyone.
