DEV Community: Joshua McMillan

Frontend developer collaboration / hire

Joshua McMillan — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 17:05:20 +0000

Hey there 👋

My SaaS startup is looking to boost marketing efforts by collaborating with several frontend developers, on a affiliate scheme and being paid company equity. You will simply promote Symbols by posting content (social media content) of you building cool UI kits & web projects on our platform (includes open source development). This could be a simple screen recording of you building a UI component from scratch, to a tutorial. It’s up to you how much effort you put in (whatever generates views/sales)...

Requirements:
Ideally proficient in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Don't need to be familiar with our specific product, as docs/tutorials detailed will be provided

What is Symbols?
It’s basically Figma but for developers, where you can build fully functional & reusable UI kits for any web project on a canvas. It reflects 15+ years experience building design systems & applications for Google, Siemens and many startups, to make UI kit development significantly faster and cheaper through reusability.

We already have our first few customers!

Here is a quick landing (new one coming soon):
https://symbols-beta.framer.website/

How it will work and what about payment?
This depends on the level of commitment, as we are quite flexible and open. For example, we are looking at paying 50% for every sale (e.g we sell plans for $100) that is made through all videos with content of your screen recordings (building cool UI/web projects). You could just go by the affiliate scheme work as much as you want to promote Symbols. If you also wanted to agree on a fixed number of hours for deeper partnership, then we can also pay you in company equity as well.

APPLY VIA LINK
https://forms.gle/Uk2aMby2WpBKaRav6

Exploring your entire UI library in different global themes 🔭

Joshua McMillan — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 17:31:32 +0000

Developers, design system engineers…
👀 Exploring your entire UI library or individual components & pages in different global themes with your team, doesn't have to be difficult.

💫 It can be done with just a click of a button!

See more here:
https://lnkd.in/edEPpWEw

Try Symbols out today!
https://symbols-beta.framer.website/

We are building Figma for developers 🎨

Joshua McMillan — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 17:10:20 +0000

What is Symbols?

“The ultimate platform for developers & teams to build, test and document fully functional & reusable UI libraries on a canvas. Publish as a website or export to your existing tech stack with open-source development”

Currently in beta access. Comes with access to 900+ UI components
Build any website or add new functionality to existing web projects in minutes. From landing pages to SaaS applications.

Lifetime offers
We are currently running one off offers for the first 100 users from $49 USD, which includes unlimited projects or users for 1 project. Eventually charging $49 per month per user/project, as design system platforms charge a similar amount. So grab a deal!

Here is a quick landing put together, with a better one in the works :)

https://symbols-beta.framer.website/

Any questions let me know!

Building 100% reusable UI kits

Joshua McMillan — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 17:51:19 +0000

Hey devs :)

Introduction

With 15+ years of UI kit building & design systems, my team is launching a platform (free beta access) that allows developers to build consistent & fully functional UI kits / design systems in days, instead of months. Giving you best practices with the most advanced system design/system design for reusing UI components, combined with access to 900+ open-source components that you can build anything with.

Yes it’s open source tech with no vendor lock. Which means you can export any part of your UI kit / project at anytime. Our goal isn’t to enhance your tech stack, not to lock you in.

Anyways, why should you care?

Well first what are the problems we are trying to solve, and how can we possibly build a UI kit this fast?

Reusability and consistency being the umbrella challenges that devs face on a daily basis.

For example, a few common issues…

How do I rebrand my entire component library for a new project that has a totally different set of branding requirements?
Collaborating with non-developers such as designers on available properties (colour tokens) to use is a pain
How do I easily organise and inspect my library, to avoid rebuilding components that are already available (especially as a team)
If the component has too many properties, it becomes hard to scale and reuse. Therefore encourages new components being made, which degrades the efficiency of the design system
While component libraries such as Tailwind and Bootstrap are good off the shelf component libraries, they are typically hard and time consuming to customise to your own personal requirements, because they are built for certain use cases and styling
The rise in design system and documentation tools such as Storybook and Zero height solve part of these issues, which is mainly communication between teams. However the effectiveness of a design system is based on the system design itself, which non of these offer. Therefore requiring you to still spend huge amounts of time and money developing a system that promotes reusability across your entire UI kit and design system code architecture.

How does Symbols solve this challenges?

A few key points…

Aside from 900+ components being provided for you to build whatever you want, you can build are 100% customisable components. The properties can easily be override anytime
Review and organise your component library into tags, to avoid building existing ones
A highly advanced design system that does the heavy lifting of complex tasks at the code level, such as auto generated type scale for both typography and spacing. This makes creating responsive design much easier, as you no-longer have to set-up the spacing sequence for each component. Apply global design changes such as dark mode across entire library and more
Use and fetch token names across your entire UI kit, which significantly reduces the lines of code = code becomes more reusable and scalable
Easily build, test, document any part of your project in isolation, including functions, pages, individual components and the colours in your designs system
Rebrand your entire UI kit/ project with automatic spacing/responsive changes, just by reconfiguring the design system menu
With real-time collaboration and no-code / low-code tools, you can build your project with other developers and non-developers at the same time
Avoid having to setup and maintain multiple design system tools / documents, as the platforms UX is setup to easily view your project as the documentation across all tech/non-tech teams
Changes seen instantly to dev version of web project, before publishing to production

To note, the platform is highly configurable to your preferences. You do not need to follow the design system if you choose not to, and you can switch off certain settings of the design system, as it is treated as an overlay.

This month, we add canvas mode to the platform. Making Symbols, “Figma for developers”, with your entire functional/animated/interactive UI kits being available on a canvas. That also means the ability to test your entire UI kit in different modes, such as left to right accessibility, responsive devices, global modes and more.

What to see more functionality and try it out?

Here is a quick landing page I put together (I’m the marketing founder) that showcases Symbols in action via videos.

https://symbols-campaign.framer.website/

Feedback is appreciated!
Any questions, let me know :)