Building React UIs visually with Yang Zhang of Plasmic

Join us this month as our special guest, Yang Zhang of Plasmic, talks about how they are building tools that enable developers to visually design and build React components. If you're a heavy user of the DevTools CSS inspector, or you spend time translating Figma designs to code, this talk will show how you can build components visually, speed up your workflow, and improve collaboration with designers. A Q&A will follow the talk.

Here’s a blurb from a previous talk from Yang:

Design tools are fast and 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, intended to help bridge this divide. 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. This talk will also cover some of the challenges with building such a tool (which itself is a React application).