Storybook: UI Engineering with Zoltan Olah

React, Vue, and Angular are the most popular frontend JavaScript frameworks. Each of these frameworks lets frontend developers build components. A component is a high level visual abstraction that is used to compose a user interface.

Frontend development has moved towards component-driven-development. At a typical technology company, a designer will put together a design file of different user interface elements, and the frontend engineer will take those UI elements and program code that can render those designs as components. As organizations have started to reuse their components and share them across the organization, the efficiency of design and frontend engineering is improving.

User interface is gaining more of an emphasis with organizations and new tools are allowing frontend engineers and designers to work together more productively. One of these tools is Storybook, a system for sharing components and the code that renders those components.

Zoltan Olah joins the show to talk about Storybook, and his company Chroma. Chroma is building tools to allow design-driven teams to work more effectively. We talked about how the relationship of designers and frontend engineers has some resemblance to the relationship between “dev” and “ops” before the DevOps movement. There are some frictions in the process of moving between design and engineering implementation, and in talking to Zoltan, I got an understanding for how much the UI layer could improve through better tooling.

Transcript

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