The internal site rebuild is still in testing, and I'm writing the formal documentation for it now — the unglamorous work that has to happen before something built in three days is safe to call finished. But the more visible result of showing what was possible is that I've been handed something bigger: I'm now the lead on a new design system for the team.
What "design system" actually means here
The idea is to take our most modern system and strip it down into reusable components, then document each one, so pages stop reinventing their own version of a button or a table. It's the same instinct behind the reusable CSS classes and tokenized colors from the rebuild, just formalized into something the rest of the team can actually reference instead of something that only lives in my head.
Why now
This isn't something I asked for, and it didn't come directly from the internal rollout's success — it came from the EMR product still sitting there waiting on contract acceptance. With that stuck, the idea became: use the time to build the design page that holds our components and practices, instead of just waiting on legal. It's still the same pattern I've noticed since the ADA agent, though — the more the results show up as something concrete and demoable, the more I get handed the next piece that used to be nobody's job.
It's also a bigger task than anything I've led on my own before. I'm leading it, with two junior developers assigned to help — and two weeks until the first demo.
What's next
Testing on the internal site is still ongoing, and the documentation has to be good enough that someone who wasn't in the room for the rebuild can actually use the components correctly — including the two junior devs now depending on it, not just me. That's the real test, same as with the agents: not whether I can build it, but whether it holds up once it's not just me running it. Demo's in two weeks.