GitHub's UI: Past, Present, and a 10x Frontend Cost
2025-01-24
This is a retrospective by GitHub engineer Joel Hawksley on the evolution of GitHub's UI architecture. He recounts GitHub's journey from simpler beginnings to its current focus on usability and accessibility, highlighting the challenges encountered along the way. He emphasizes that mobile is the new baseline, and building and maintaining design systems (like Primer) comes with unforeseen costs, with frontend code complexity being 10 times that of backend. Hawksley advises developers to avoid reinventing the wheel, leverage existing design systems, and carefully budget for frontend complexity to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Development
UI Architecture