Charles Lee
Front-end developer with a passion for design systems and accessibility.
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Targeted extensibility: Lessons learned from building Atlaskit
Often when building a design system we face tension between consistent and resilient API’s that encapsulate valuable and reusable logic, and sufficient flexibility to ensure that our components can be customised to fit bespoke product use cases. Towing this line is difficult, and becomes more difficult as a design system scales. Charles uncovers some of the hard-learned lessons towing this line in React-Select, and Atlaskit – Atlassian’s Design System.
February 2020
More posts from other Thinkmill voices
- Designing beyond the median user
For seventy years software has shipped one shape to every user. The confluence of design systems, headless platforms, and agent-native exposure has coalesced to make that constraint optional. A retrospective of the median-user problem and the new architectural horizon now opening.
June 2026 ·10 min read - What engineering teams owe for the AI speed boost
AI-assisted development genuinely accelerated engineering teams, but many organisations stopped at the velocity gains and ignored the accumulating debt. The costs: code nobody fully understands, weakened code review culture, bloated dependency trees, and architectural decisions made without real judgement about tradeoffs...
May 2026 ·4 min read - A behavioural framework for the monsters in your team
The AI in Design 2026 report captures a profession mid-mutation. The "Frankenjob" label the coverage put on it misses the seam where the real work happens.
May 2026 ·5 min read
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