This site uses one functional cookie to keep feature rollouts consistent for you. Nothing is set until you choose. See the privacy notice.
Dev notes
Extracting tokens and components out of this app into a shared design system, then wiring it back in alongside an Angular consumer. Four npm packages, one source of truth.
This app and the Angular desktop simulator both define their own colors, spacing, typography, and component styles. When a color changes, it changes in two places. When a button style gets updated, the Angular version drifts. There's no shared language between the two apps.
The design system uses CSS custom properties (--paul-color-primary-500) as the single source of truth. Not Sass variables, not JS-in-CSS, not Tailwind theme values. CSS custom properties work everywhere without a build step. A vanilla HTML page can link the stylesheet and use the tokens immediately.
The tokens build process generates CSS, SCSS, and JSON outputs from a single JavaScript definition. Consumers pick the format that fits their stack.
The system ships as four npm packages under the @paul-portfolio scope:
@layer for specificity managementThis app uses Tailwind CSS v4, which reads design tokens from CSS custom properties via an @theme block in globals.css. The bridge is a tokens.css file that aliases every --paul-* variable to the unprefixed name the app already uses:
--color-primary-600: var(--paul-color-primary-600); --radius-md: var(--paul-radius-md); --shadow-sm: var(--paul-shadow-sm);
Every Tailwind utility like bg-primary-600 now reads from the design system. Change a color in the tokens package, rebuild, and both apps update.
Button and Input were migrated to thin adapters wrapping @paul-portfolio/react. The adapters preserve the existing prop API so no call sites needed changes. Components with app-specific behavior (Modal with Framer Motion animations, Tooltip with fixed positioning and delays, Chip with color props) were left as-is. They still consume the shared tokens through CSS.
The Angular desktop simulator has a fundamentally different visual identity (macOS-style chrome, traffic light buttons, dock magnification). Replacing its components with the design system would break the aesthetic. Instead, a token-bridge.scss maps shared concepts like typography scales, motion durations, border radii, and z-index layers. Desktop-specific tokens (colors, window chrome, dock) stay local.
Packages are published under the @paul-portfolio npm scope with public access. During development, both consumer apps used file: paths pointing at the local monorepo. For CI, those were swapped to version ranges (^0.1.3) so the runner can resolve dependencies from the registry.
Nine bugs surfaced across the integration. The first three appeared at publish time. The next two were visual regressions in the consumer app. Two showed up when wiring Storybook and Chromatic for visual regression testing in CI. The last two were interaction bugs that only appeared after real usage.
0.5, so the tokens package generated --paul-spacing-0.5. Some browsers tolerate this, but Next.js's SWC CSS parser does not — it reads the dot as a number literal and crashes. The fix was replacing dots with underscores in the build script (--paul-spacing-0_5). The lesson: test your token output against the strictest CSS parser in your toolchain, not just the browser.npx tsc as their build script. The tsconfig included src/ which also compiles src/__tests__/. The test files import vitest matchers that extend the assertion types, so tsc failed trying to resolve them. The first publish shipped empty dist folders. The fix was excluding __tests__ from tsconfig. The real fix is a proper bundler (tsup or Vite library mode) that only builds what you tell it to.ButtonAsButton | ButtonAsAnchor. The disabled prop only existed on the button branch, so TypeScript couldn't guarantee it was available on both. Moving shared props to a common base type fixed the type error. Similarly, the app-level adapter couldn't spread button-typed event handlers (onClick: MouseEventHandler<HTMLButtonElement>) into the anchor branch. The fix was splitting the render path by checking href and only passing shared props to the anchor variant.@theme block in globals.css had entries like --color-background: var(--color-background). This looks harmless — it seems like it's just forwarding the value from tokens.css. But @theme creates new CSS custom properties. So the variable references itself, and per the CSS spec a self-referencing custom property resolves to the "guaranteed-invalid value." Every Tailwind utility that used these tokens — colors, shadows, border radii — silently broke. Everything was square, shadowless, and missing colors. The fix was pointing each entry at the --paul-* prefixed source token instead.@paul-portfolio/css/index.css brought in the full design system: a CSS reset, base typography, heading sizes, button resets, and all component CSS. The reset's @layer declarations conflicted with Tailwind v4's own layer system, and the base styles overrode the app's heading sizes and link colors. Spacing, layout, and typography all shifted. The fix was removing the import entirely — this app uses the React component package (which handles its own CSS classes) and only needs the tokens CSS for the raw --paul-* custom properties.../../react/src/. Locally this works because the source files are right there. In CI, the react package's exports field points at dist/ which doesn't exist until after a build step that CI never ran. The fix was switching imports to the package name (@paul-portfolio/react) and adding a Vite alias in the Storybook config to resolve it back to source. This also required setting esbuild.jsx: 'automatic' — without it, esbuild compiled the source TSX files using classic JSX mode (React.createElement), but the source files don't import React.createPortal to render into document.body, which puts the dialog outside Chromatic's capture root. The interactive story that clicks "Open Modal" and then asserts the dialog is visible crashed during Chromatic's snapshot. The fix was disabling the interactive story for Chromatic and adding a separate "Open" story that renders the Modal in a static open state — no user interaction needed for the visual snapshot.--paul-spacing-1_5), but the CSS component package still referenced the old escaped-dot names (--paul-spacing-1\.5). These don't match. Buttons, chips, badges, and tooltips all lost their padding. The fix was updating all five CSS files to use underscore names. The lesson: when you rename tokens, grep every consumer package — the CSS package is a consumer too, not just the apps.useEffect had handleKeyDown in its dependency array. handleKeyDown depends on onClose, which is an inline arrow function that gets a new reference on every parent render. Every time TanStack Query's background polling re-rendered the calendar page, the effect re-ran and called requestAnimationFrame(() => focusable[0].focus()), stealing focus from whatever input you were typing in. The fix was storing the handler in a ref so the effect only runs when open changes.The original fix for the CSS reset conflict was to remove the @paul-portfolio/css import entirely and import individual component files when needed. That works but it's fragile — every time you add a design system component, you have to remember to add another import line.
The proper fix was adding a components.css entry point to the CSS package. It imports all component and utility styles but skips the reset and base layers entirely. Tailwind consumers use this instead of index.css:
@import "@paul-portfolio/css/components.css";
Now this app gets all design system component styles through one import with no reset conflicts. When new components are added to the design system, they're automatically available here. The index.css entry point still exists for consumers that want the full package — vanilla HTML apps that don't bring their own reset. This also made @paul-portfolio/css an explicit dependency in package.json rather than relying on it being a transitive dependency of the React package.
The design system grew eleven chart forms: sparkline, bar, donut, funnel, radar, scatter, cohort heatmap, pareto, gauge, word cloud, and stacked/multi-series line. All of them compute their geometry in one pure, dependency-free core that is mirrored into the Angular package and unit tested in both, so the two copies cannot drift. Every chart renders plain SVG with role="img" and a data summary as its accessible name, which means colour is never the only signal.
That was the plan. Three things turned up along the way that had nothing to do with charts and had all been true for a while.
The Angular package did not work. It was built with plain tsc, so the published output was raw decorators: no compiled component definitions in the JavaScript, none of the declarations a consuming app type checks against. Every component in it uses signal input(), which needs the Angular compiler to exist at build time. A consumer binding an input would have got nothing, silently. The first render test written against the package reproduced it in one assertion. The fix is ng-packagr in partial compilation mode, and a verify:consumer step that compiles a stand-in consumer against the built output with strict template checking, because nothing else in the repo consumed the artifact it publishes.
The chart palette failed its colour checks. Slots one and two, the first two series in every multi-series chart, were blue and purple at a perceptual distance of 1.3 under deuteranopia and 12 for normal vision, against a floor of 15. The last slot sat outside the lightness band and below the chroma floor, so it read as grey. The replacement reorders and re-steps the ramp, adds a cyan hue the token set was missing, and picks the dark mode values separately rather than flipping the light ones, because the dark lightness band is tighter. The six checks now live in the repo as a test, so the next colour edit cannot quietly undo it.
The CSS package's tests had never run. Twenty-one test files, a vitest config, a parser dependency, and no test in its package.json, so the workspace-wide test command skipped the package entirely. 139 assertions that had never executed once. They all pass now that they run, which is luck rather than reassurance: a skipped workspace and a passing one look identical in the output.
A chart primitive is an opinion about how data should be read, so a few of these needed an argument rather than an API.
The pareto chart has one y axis. The textbook version puts counts on the left and cumulative percent on the right. Two scales on one plot have an arbitrary alignment, which invents a relationship the data does not contain. Here the bars are percent of total and the line is cumulative percent, both on 0 to 100, so the crossing point means something. A test asserts no rendered label is a raw count, because the rule is easier to break than to remember.
Ordered data gets an ordered ramp. Funnel stages and heatmap cells encode magnitude, so they use a single-hue sequential ramp rather than the categorical series palette. Putting identity colours on ordered data spends the one free channel on information the chart already shows through length or position.
The word cloud ships with its own objection. Glyph area is not a comparable encoding and a long word reads as bigger than a short one at the same weight. It exists because a gallery wants one. The caveat is at the top of its doc comment, and its accessible name carries the complete ranked list even when the layout drops a term, so the honest version of the data is always present.
Reduced motion means stop rotating, not rotate slower. The spinner answered prefers-reduced-motion by slowing from 0.6s to 1.5s. Rotation is the vestibular trigger, so that is the same motion for longer. It now swaps to an opacity pulse with no rotation at all. It does not stop dead, because a frozen spinner is indistinguishable from a hung one, and the component already announces itself to assistive tech through a live status role, so the animation only ever served sighted users.
The Ticker's marquee duplicates its content so the loop looks seamless, and the copy is aria-hidden. Its focusable controls were pulled out of the tab order by an effect that ran after render. An effect runs after paint, so between mount and that effect the duplicate held tabbable buttons inside a hidden container, and every re-render reopened the window.
Hiding something from assistive technology while leaving it reachable by keyboard is worse than not hiding it: the user tabs onto a control a screen reader insists is not there. Both packages now mark the clone inert, which takes the tab order and the accessibility tree out together — the pair that had come apart. The manual sweep stays behind a capability check for browsers without support.
What is worth keeping is where it was found. Not in the library, which had a comment asserting that assistive tech never saw the duplicate, and not in its own test suite. It was an accessibility scan on a page in this app that happened to render the component. A shared library means one mistake reaches every consumer at once; it also means the first consumer to look properly finds it for all of them. The Angular port carried the identical bug, comment and all, and was still in review — so that copy was fixed before it ever shipped.
Pulling the new packages into this app took an explicit version bump rather than an install: the dependencies were pinned with a caret on a 0.x range, and a caret on a zero-major does not cross a minor. The app would have sat on the old version indefinitely while appearing to track the package.
The bump immediately failed a test, which is the outcome I wanted. The design-system gallery in this app asserts that it documents every component the package exports, and the new release added fourteen it had never heard of. That test is doing the job a changelog cannot: it makes an undocumented component a build failure rather than a gap somebody notices months later. All fourteen are documented now, each with the accessibility guarantees read off the component rather than assumed, and each marked as shipping in the package but not yet adopted here — because claiming otherwise would be the easy lie.
npm pack --dry-run and inspect every file in the tarball. If a file is 0 bytes or a test file, the build is wrong.file: paths in PRs that go through CI. They work locally but fail on any runner that doesn't have the sibling repo checked out. Publish first, then open the consumer PR with version ranges.tsconfig.build.json that only includes source files.@theme block is a definition, not a passthrough. Tailwind v4's @theme creates new custom properties. Writing --color-X: var(--color-X) looks like it's forwarding a value, but it's actually creating a circular reference that silently resolves to nothing. Always reference a differently-named source variable.@layer declarations on top of Tailwind. Use components.css instead — it ships only component styles with no reset.exports point at dist/, add a Vite alias to resolve the package to source. And if the source files use JSX without importing React, set esbuild.jsx: 'automatic' in the Vite config.createPortal renders outside it. Interactive stories that open portalled content will crash the snapshot. Add a separate story that renders the component in its open state without interaction.--paul-spacing-0.5 to --paul-spacing-0_5 in the tokens package is only half the fix. The CSS component package is a consumer too — it was still referencing the old escaped-dot names and silently failing. Treat token renames as cross-package breaking changes and grep everything.test script is silently excluded from npm test --workspaces. Nothing fails. Count the suites in the output occasionally, not just the colour of it.onClose prop is typically an inline arrow function — new reference on every parent render. If your useEffect depends on a callback derived from it, the effect re-runs on every render. If the effect manages focus, it steals focus from inputs. Store the handler in a ref instead.Update — August 15, 2026
The Verdigris & Ember redesign started life in this app as local overrides of the package variables — which works, and is backwards. The whole point of a tokens package is to be the place the palette is decided. So the packages adopted it: primary is verdigris, secondary is ember, neutral is warm ink-on-paper, the semantic surfaces moved off pure white and near-black, and a display font token leads with Bricolage Grotesque. The values are taken verbatim from what this app already ships, so the swap lands with no visible change here, and the Angular app and Ketsup inherit it on their next dependency bump.
The interesting part is what the system's own gates did to the design. The chart palette has a test that measures adjacent slots under deuteranopia, written after a blue/purple collision. Dropping ember in beside amber reproduced that exact failure — a colour distance of 1.3, the same number the test was born from. An exhaustive search over every slot order proved no arrangement of the existing ramps could pass, so the finding became the design: amber leaves the categorical set, a violet supporting ramp joins, and the shipped set clears the colour-blind band by a factor of six. The warmer surface also exposed that success-600 and warning-600 had been under the 3:1 floor all along — the old palette only looked compliant because nobody had moved the background underneath it.
The "no visual regression testing" gap recorded below is also closed: the Storybook build runs through Chromatic now, and its review pass earned its keep immediately by flagging a real contrast regression this recolour introduced — that catch has its own entry in the accessibility write-up.
Update — August 15, 2026
Publishing the palette was the easy half. The half that told me whether this system is real was upgrading the three apps that consume it, because a design system only earns the name if a version bump lands the change without anyone reopening the components.
This app had been shipping the palette as local overrides — literal ramps in its own stylesheet, plus a block feeding those values back into the package variables because the shared CSS styles its components from those directly. Both halves became redundant the moment the package shipped the same values, and they had to be deleted together: reading a colour from the package while writing that same package variable from the colour is a circular reference, and CSS resolves that to nothing rather than to an error. I caught it as a transparent page body, then found a second copy of the same block in the dark-theme half that I had missed on the first pass.
The Angular app repainted nothing at all, and proving that was the whole job. Its token bridge deliberately passes typography, motion, radii and z-index and never colours, because its palette is macOS-simulation identity rather than design language. I pixel-diffed three views in both themes before and after: zero differing pixels below the menu bar, with the only deltas being clock digits ticking between captures. The new palette is provably live in its served stylesheet; it simply never reaches the desktop chrome. A null result is worth measuring rather than asserting.
Ketsup is where the bump found a real bug. Its bridge covered primary 300 through 700, and the newer button stylesheet also reads 50, 100, 200, 900 and 950 for its secondary variant — so those fell through to the package’s stock ramp. The shared secondary button had been rendering a stock blue fill under an ember label, in two live places, and nothing had caught it because a missing custom property does not error, it inherits. That is the same failure mode as the circular reference here and the alias rot in the accessibility notes: CSS variables fail quietly, three different ways, in one week.
Update — August 16, 2026
The update above ends by saying the “no visual regression testing” gap recorded below it is closed, because the Storybook build runs through Chromatic now. I recorded that gap as closed and it was not. The check had been comparing nothing for about a month by the time I wrote that sentence, and I did not find out by it failing.
The snapshot quota is exhausted. The UI Tests check says so plainly — update your plan to resume testing — while the job beside it reports pass, because exitZeroOnChanges is set and a build that never took a snapshot has no changes to report. Green on a flag rather than on a comparison, and nothing in the checks list distinguishes those.
The setting underneath it is the part that should not have been left running. autoAcceptChanges is pointed at the release branch, so a build there takes what it sees and makes it the reference for everything afterwards. Whatever drift landed during that month — and this was the month of the recolour, so the odds are not hypothetical — was queued to be adopted as the baseline on the next release merge and vouched for from then on. A gate that misses a regression leaves a gap; one positioned to ratify one and then certify it is worse than not having the gate at all.
So the honest state of this system is the one recorded before that update: it has no visual regression testing, and now it has a check claiming otherwise, which is a worse position than the plain gap was. I found this while deciding whether to move that workflow to Node 24, and the decision became to leave it exactly where it is until there is quota — an unverifiable visual change riding inside a CI-configuration change is the wrong trade. It sits with three other findings of the same shape in green checks, including one that mattered here directly: the tokens package was compiling its own tests into the directory it publishes from, so every tarball shipped ten test files until this week.