Retrospective from the great team Angelica "Angie" Quirarte built here. It was a lot of fun working together to demonstrate new methods and tools while shipping 18 projects in 12 weeks.
- No approval for user testing services? Take the working prototypes out to the Sacramento park and get immediate feedback.
- Using static site generation, lambdas for APIs, web components for the frontend for lean, easy to maintain and scale services.
- Handling internationalization, how leveraging Spanish as the base language improved automated translation output.
- Evangelizing automated end to end testing, accessibility checks as part of build pipelines.
- Working in the open, sharing progress regularly, keeping all the repos open source.
- Human centered design, Iterative development, fast feedback loops.
- How a lot of these processes, tools and techniques took root in state departments and future projects.
Published 7/12/2025
I wrote up a case study of a couple different data visualization tools we used for the State of California’s COVID-19 site for the Planet Performance web performance blog.
Published 12/3/2022
The open source California design system's code is on github. We wrote about the tech choices we made creating it, the process of working in the open and some of our collaborators.
Published 5/31/2022
A Smashing magazine article about our publishing architecture. We use both WordPress and static site generation getting the best of both worlds.
Published 3/23/2021
The CA.gov Alpha team was tasked with developing the California state COVID-19 emergency response website in collaboration with the CHHS Office of Innovation and the California Department of Technology.
Our challenge: Create a scalable, accessible, stable website that is easy to update in a fast changing public health crisis. And do it in four days.
Interview about this work is at the beginning of web.dev LIVE 2020: Day One
Published 4/29/2020
Approximately one million California residents currently only have access to drinking water that does not meet state and federal standards. The volunteer Open Oakland Water Quality Project is building tools in collaboration with non profit activists and government to help highlight which communities are in the most need of assistance.
Published 10/15/2019, 5:00:00 PM Read more
Shadow free Custom Elements are fun to build with
Published 9/30/2019, 5:00:00 PM Read more
From server side javascript to serverless, successfully building node.js applications in Express and Architect
Published 7/31/2019, 5:00:00 PM Read more
Running tests against your web components in isolation and end to end tests after components are integrated into a larger application
Published 6/30/2019, 5:00:00 PM Read more
Party preference visualizations based on voter registration data 
Published 6/30/2017, 5:00:00 PM Read more
An automated deployment system that runs a set of tests reviewing site functionality against a real system before pushing to live environments provides real peace of mind.
Published 9/30/2015, 5:00:00 PM Read more
