Building React UIs Visually with Yang Zhang

Join us for a remote conversation with Yang as he discusses his latest project, a UI builder tool named Plasmic.

-------

Design tools are amazing tools for thought, but for a host of reasons are limited to creating drawings rather than production assets. Engineers must instead re-create surfaces from scratch, by hand, using code. This inevitably leads to discrepancies and back-and-forth with the design team, and ultimately two sources of truth that are never truly in sync.

Plasmic is a tool to build UIs visually, currently in heavy development. It loosely resembles a design tool and aims to give the same sense of speedy iteration, but is for building maintainable, production-ready presentational components. The idea is to give developers a better and faster development experience, eliminate an entire class of visual bugs/QA/tooling, and ultimately maintain a single source of truth with design.

Yang had an early career in distributed database systems and machine learning, but discovered a passion in creating tools that directly touch and empower users. His time with React and JS has seen him build things from complex spreadsheet software to massively multiplayer real-time browser games. He is now building Plasmic full time.