NEW: ProPublica went inside the detention center for immigrant families in Dilley, Texas. Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of what comes next.

Just spent two hours migrating away from all google & amazon services. 90% of this time was spent on figuring out how to actually delete organization on google’s admin console (I hate that UI even more now).

Working on naming guidelines and design tokens architecture today. I’ve produced so much content that my brain is now mush and it’s barely past noon

We’re currently working on revised foundations for the new Kesko Design System and I’m researching the existing color systems + their usage across various products and contexts. Super fascinating work given the scale of the organization. 😍 Here's a glimpse into what’s happening:

This winter has reached a point where I’m like *oh, its only -18°C right now, that’s not too bad*

Could we all just collectively post a bit less about people doing or saying dumb things, and a bit more about people doing or saying good things?

👋 Ahoy hoy! I'm looking for new client/contract work opportunities. I'm a front-end developer that has a penchant for specialising in design systems, design tokens, & components. If you're building, maintaining or working on a design system, I can help. Let's chat! [email protected]. 🙏🖤

Would you like to work with me? 👋🏻 I’m currently helping to strengthen the existing design systems team at Kesko and we’re looking for a nice & talented designer/developer to join us. arielsalminen.com/2026/hiring-...

Solving the Cheese Crave™

Work with the best manager I’ve ever had? 🥺

Would you like to work with me? 👋🏻 I’m currently helping to strengthen the existing design systems team at Kesko and we’re looking for a nice & talented designer/developer to join us. arielsalminen.com/2026/hiring-...

Kicking off 2026 at work finally. First up: finishing a job posting to find someone to help me with the current project.

Hamburg looks like home now. ❄️

You should leave Substack in 2026, because they platform fascists regularly, but even before that I am *begging* you to stop referring to your writing as "my Substack" because why give them that agency. It's your writing, your posts, your words, on their platform.

Arielle being introduced to the weirdest German New Year's traditions

Off to Hamburg (🇩🇪) with the kids to celebrate New Year’s with my partner's family.

Just merged @annaecook.com’s PR to design-system.club ☺️

My response to anything over the next two weeks

Nice to get great feedback about the past autumn from a client of mine just before the holidays. Especially when it’s about me exceeding their (already originally) high expectations.

Focusing on very important bits on this placeholder page elenajs.com

Something that hasn't been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features. We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this. …

Decided to start my vacation a day earlier than planned. So just basically pinged the rest of the team with *see y'all in 4 weeks.* 😂

Been neck deep within React/Next.js this past week and now wish I was on that *vacation already* (2 more days of work left!). But hey, SSR & Next.js Server Components support for these Custom Elements seems to be working finally 😍

This open source *thing* is moving forward on the side as I’m working on the core custom elements/web components tooling for my client’s design system.

Baked a little evening snack for me and kids

Safari 26.2 is here with 65 features + 165 bug fixes — including field-sizing, Navigation API, Largest Contentful Paint, command & commandfor, CHIPS opt-in partitioned cookies, scrollend event, random(), WebGPU in WebXR, scrollbar-color, hidden=until-found and much more! webkit.org/blog/17640/w...

A few years back, I nearly wrote "The Fallacy of Federated Design Systems." Then @nathanacurtis.bsky.social beat me to it. But what happens when you try it anyway? At Spotify, I watched federated fail twice, resulting in a huge number of barely reused components and damaged trust in design systems.

googled something and clicked a link to a website I'd never heard of that looked like a forum, read the discussion and realized the person asking a question and all of the answers were all LLM generated, the entire website was a fake forum pretending to be people asking/answering questions

”What’s wrong with build tools? Other languages are compiled!” Yes, but their compiler is official and always there. The #JS ecosystem has devolved into a state where abstraction, the most fundamental software engineering concept, has been outsourced to third party tooling. *That’s* the problem.

The handmade, human qualities of your work are more valuable than they've ever been. Don't doubt that for a second.

Migrated today back to a code editor without AI capabilities. Such a bliss to work with.

I do firmly believe that if you're an individual or company that is NOT over-indexing on AI right now, you have the competitive advantage. Unfortunately I do not have high hopes that the industry will recognize that until significant damage has been done.

My team at Adobe is hiring a web components engineer to help us build out the future of our design system. Great opportunity for someone earlier in their career to jump in and help us continue to improve Spectrum Web Components. In-office hybrid in LA, Denver or NYC. adobe.design/jobs/job-pos...

You can fundamentally rewire your brain to properly understand CSS layout... for $34.50. Can’t say fairer than that! One day left.

Enjoying building something new quite a bit this week.

@darn.es CEO of Jarvis Grip Framework, how may I help you

*I am not gonna build a new web component framework* *I am not gonna build a new web component framework* *I am not gonna build a new web component framework* *I am not gonna build a new web component framework* …oh wait…

Last week booked almost one month off for an upcoming Christmas break and a part of me keeps thinking *wait, what, am I actually allowed to do this now*

The link goes to this page, Import Modes section. help.figma.com/hc/en-us/art... The scheme announcement and what I thought previously was that it was an enterprise-only feature... In reading this page there are a few gotchas for us folks who have been living in token land for a while now...

Very late to the party, but if looking at the new Figma features, I think I’m most excited about the ability to _finally_ import code based components into Figma (and not the other way around). Have dreamed of this since 2016 (helloo, remember react-sketchapp???).

Starting the weekend with a decent cup of coffee & building demos + writing about SSR for Web Components. This is covered way too little anywhere online imho. Especially since there’re so many ways to approach it.

Saw this random t-shirt online and I obviously *needed* it.

A bit of a vulnerable post by me but we need your help to get us through what has been a more difficult period than 2020. It would be really appreciated if you could read and share in your networks too 💛 bell.bz/its-been-a-v...

Our Black Friday deals are now live! Save £60 on *all courses* and everyone who buys a course during this period will be given a coupon code that they can use to get a 50% discount off future course purchases at any time. piccalilli.link/black-friday...

Saw a dream last night where me, @darn.es & @wicky.nillia.ms were building watch faces with CSS (🤷‍♀️) and competing who can build the most complicated one with as little code as possible 🙃

Alternate alt text... [left, ariel's design systems] [right, dave's design systems]

I have today reached a new level in the game called never-ending job of selling design systems

Found a new space to work on my bicycles 😍

i made a pillow for our phones - turns on do not disturb when you lay your phone on top

React made me re-render my life choices