iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 16h

Layoffs suck. Grief is hard. I lost an amazing icon & type designer. And I lost a design token wizard — truly one of the best at color theory I’ve ever seen. And a mobile designer / technologist who was truly amazing — design system alumni. If you’re looking to hire, I am happy to connect you.

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Reposted by Alan B Smith

Josh Black @josh.black · 27/09/2026

Finally got a post up on the GitHuh blog github.blog/engineering/... 👀

github.blog

Improving site performance by shipping more CSS

How we fully migrated github.com away from CSS-in-JS.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

VAR doing us zero favors today. 🤦‍♂️ #SummitUp

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The Google fat bear week game Is very cute. More fat bears, please.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Started learning the basics of building an ontology. This Ontology 101 doc was very helpful. I wanted to stick to the core infrastructure, but I found I need to have a solid knowledge base structure to get good output from it. Down another rabbit hole we go. 🐰 🕳️ protege.stanford.edu/publications...

protege.stanford.edu

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Design systems pushed forever for people to read docs (RTFM). And in the AI era, something finally is – ty, Claude. 🙏 But unstructured data is still too unreliable. Non-deterministic output clever enough to pose as authoritative truth is worse. Design md files are a sham. We need a better system.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I’m new to A2UI, and it‘s possible I’m missing something important, but I think the Margin Leaf spec is flawed? We learned this lesson a while ago on the web. Adding margin to child elements instead of containers is error prone. That’s why we moved to use gap instead. a2ui.org/specificatio...

a2ui.org

Basic Catalog Guide - A2UI

A2UI, a streaming protocol for Agent-Driven User Interfaces

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Normally the neighborhood park goes unused, but this season, the city ran out of fields and had to set up nets here too. The result: Kids pouring In from all over the neighborhood to play pickup soccer on a beautiful evening. More of this please. Calcio è della gente. ⚽️

A large green pitch with two soccer goals overlooking a beautiful Colorado sunset over the mountains. Lots of bikes are in piles off to the side, and kids are playing on the field.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I think knowledge graphs are now a core part of a design system‘s product offering. Maybe this is just the evolution of documentation though. Similar to when we moved from style guides to shipping actual components. We’re moving from providing design data to design intelligence. 🧠

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I spent the day trying to recreate the cardamom buns I had in Stockholm. I got close, but we need to do more testing.

Several half sheets full of cardamom buns cooling after being pulled from the oven

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Kind of a long shot, but I’ll ask: Has anyone put their design patterns and rules into a proper graph db or graph RAG to support your design system ontology? Looking to bounce some ideas with someone in the design-engineer space and maybe compare notes.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Engineers like consuming our design tokens as JS objects. Typeahead, and JSDoc notes are great for providing context and helping them choose the right tokens. The problem is the tokens are in big objects, so tree shaking doesn't work well, and you end up with a significant performance hit.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I used to let slightly wrong Slack answers go without correction and assume a human reading the thread will be able to parse it out as a simple mistake. But now I make explicit corrections because it’s likely a bot will strip that response out of context as an authoritative answer for someone else.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

It was 102°F (39°C) today, so I made frozen sangria.

A deep plum colored frozen sangria in a hatched rocks glass garnished with green apple, orange, and strawberry slices.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Fully support UEFA boycotting FIFA. It would drastically improve USA’s chances of making it to the quarterfinals in 2030.Maybe we’d even make the semis. 😂

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

RichText implies PoorText, which is probably what happens when I'm forced to type without autocorrect.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Anthropic should take a note from 1990 cell phone providers and start offering off-peak token rates: 100,000 anytime tokens, with free nights* and weekends. *nightly token rates begin at 9:00pm EST

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I was thinking about watching the Rapids game, but all your posts are making me nervous. 😬

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

England, please don’t blow a 4-0 lead. You’ll never live it down. 🙏

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

This is, hands down, the best World Cup I’ve ever seen. The matchups have been excellent at every level.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

As a design system leader, you have to continuously prove the value you provide. But you also need the support of leaders who truly believe in your autonomy and intrinsic value of your system.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I was joking with a Canadian friend tonight about how Americans are conditioned to believe we are always underdogs and will always win. We both tried to think of sports movies where the Americans don’t win, and there are exceedingly few. That probably explains a few things.

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Reposted by Alan B Smith

Poorly Drawn Arsenal @poorlydrawnarsenal.com · 07/07/2026

This is why you don’t get rid of the department of defense.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

It’s the hope that kills you.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

I like Haaland much more when he plays for Norway.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Right or wrong, I always bet on Ødegaard. 🇳🇴

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

You can tell France is not accustomed to dealing with the dark arts that are common practice in CONCACAF.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

My (maybe spicy?) round of 16 bets: 🌶️ Norway beats Brazil 🌶️🌶️ Mexico beats England 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Colombia beats Argentina

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Good tourney, Canada. Thanks for cohosting. This team has become heroes for the next generation of Canadian soccer players.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Wild to think that AOL used to ship *physical CDs* in the mail, and people would just run it on their desktop. You could never get people to do that now.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Component tokens – do we need 'em?

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

This is spot on. Modes and themes often get entangled, but we have to be specific in how we talk about each.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I think I’m becoming a Cape Verde fan.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

A theme from the last World Cup was “The rest of the world is catching up.” So far the theme of this World Cup is “The rest of the world is going to eat your lunch.”

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

This is the best way to describe how I feel about AI and software development: I love a good puzzle. One day someone says "Hey! Use this AutoPuzzler™. It will sort all the pieces for you, and you'll finish the puzzle in seconds! It's great! You'll save so much time! You can puzzle so much more!"

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Design token tooling has improved a lot. Keeping track of tokens is still very hard.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

It would be fun to do a design system x cocktail workshop. For example, this drink is not a traditional Paloma. It uses many of the same elements, but they are composed differently. Understanding the spec informs how you can make adjustments while maintaining alignment.

A modified Paloma served up in a rocks glass with a lime wheel and thin grapefruit peel garnish.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

She is supposedly 75% poodle \ 25% retriever. But I think there’s like 10% otter in there somewhere. 🦦

My 40lb goldendoodle curled tightly into a ball so she can fit on my lap.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

The Pope has greater AI understanding and leadership than most tech execs who have done nothing but chase relevance and market share over the last few years. You’d expect a new startup challenger to be their rival. Must be humbling to be outclassed by a 2000 year old institution. 😂 Thanks, Leo. 🙏

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Glad to have a long weekend to reset. Made some lemon sorbet and gelato. 🍨

A white ramekin with two small scoops: lemon sorbet (left) and lemon gelato (right) and three mint leaves for garnish.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Cosign this. I'm a firm believer that time is an ingredient, not an obstacle. Moving too quickly means you're missing a key ingredient, and the end result will often reflect that.

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Alan B Smith @alanbsmith.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

If you're introducing change faster than your ecosystem can absorb and adapt to it, you're not evolving systems; you're creating fragmentation and thrash. Design systems are engines for evolution, but they are also stabilizers that hold product ecosystems together.

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