iTunes Tools Styleguide
After the acquisition of Beats Music, one of the first projects I began working on was to build the internal tools for Apple Music. At the time, there was no standard style guide for the tools. I collaborated with the super rad people on the iTunes Connect design team to build a style guide. This helped the development of many internal features, cross team communication, and create a stylistic consistency throughout the internal tools.
The styleguide included snippets of code, examples of how to use each component, and could be installed into the developer’s project via their package management. The code snippets made life much easier for developers that were not as familiar with frond-end development practices, while usage examples helped the developers to know what components to use (and save time spent on inventing new interfaces.) Having a unified place where all the components lived also helped the all the teams stay consistent when building new features. Lastly, having a single source of truth enabled us to keep the tools up-to-date easily as we only had to make changes in one place.
The styleguide lived in Github. Having a single source of truth made communication much easier across teams and disciplines. As the developers needed things added or modified, they could let us know. This let us work together quickly and painlessly. Sometimes, a developer would make what they need themselves, and we could review their changes as they made pull requests. This workflow is similar to what many developers do already; so it was a comfortable mode of communication.
