The Snuggle Is Real: How Font Awesome and Shoelace Are on a Mission to Make Dev Work Easier
May 16, 2023
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Cory LaViska, founder of Shoelace, and the hosts discuss the partnership between Shoelace and Font Awesome, benefits of using web components, challenges of modern web standards, and the power of open source technology. They also touch on the importance of keeping up with industry trends and the joy of solving problems with technology.
Shoelace and Font Awesome form a partnership to make developers' lives easier by offering performant, mobile-friendly websites and a wide range of customizable icons.
Web components provide consistency, flexibility, and portability, making them a solid fit for design systems and allowing for cross-framework compatibility.
Deep dives
Partnership between Shulace and Fawn Awesome
The podcast episode features a discussion about the partnership between Shulace, the web component library, and Fawn Awesome. The hosts talk about how the partnership came about and highlight the intersection of design systems, web components, and icons. They discuss the similarities and differences between Shulace and Bootstrap and how Shulace evolved into a web component library. The hosts emphasize the goal of making designers' and developers' lives easier by offering them great products and removing pain points.
Benefits of Web Components in Design Systems
The discussion delves into the concept of web components and their role in design systems. Web components are native web platform APIs that allow the creation of custom HTML elements. The hosts highlight that web components solve many of the problems that component models within frameworks have tried to address. They discuss how web components provide consistency, flexibility, and portability, enabling components to be used in any framework. This flexibility makes web components a solid fit for design systems, allowing for a varied range of use cases and cross-framework compatibility.
The Journey of Shulace and Its Evolution
The episode covers the development and evolution of Shulace, starting from its initial version as a slimmed-down alternative to Bootstrap. The creator shares his motivation behind building Shulace, including the aim to simplify customization and explore the use of custom properties. The conversation also highlights the transition of Shulace into a web component library, leveraging the benefits of the web components standard. The hosts discuss how Shulace gained popularity with version 2.0 and how it became a powerful alternative for theming and customizing components within a design system.
Balancing Open Source and Monetization
The hosts touch upon the challenges of monetizing open source projects while maintaining the spirit of community and transparency. They emphasize the importance of providing value to users and maintaining the open source components for free while offering additional paid services. The conversation highlights the goal of making designers' and developers' lives easier and solving real-world problems. They express their passion for open source and their commitment to keeping the components open source while offering optional paid services that provide even more value.
Our guest in this episode is Cory LaViska, the founder of Shoelace — a component library that makes it easy to build performant, mobile-friendly websites using CSS grids and custom elements APIs.
Matt, Travis, and Cory discuss the partnership between Shoelace and Font Awesome, as well as their own experiences using different design systems and web components. Cory also touches on the benefits and challenges of modern web standards and the importance of keeping up with industry trends. Cory shares his favorite culinary icon, and busts Travis' chops for not having a Shoelace icon (yet.) ------------------------ TIME STAMPS
00:05:04 Customize CSS with Shoelace.
00:08:10 Reusable components for brand consistency.