Matt Seccafien

When DeepL added Arabic—its first RTL language—it wasn’t just a styling problem, it was a design systems challenge. This talk will go deep on logical CSS, platform-agnostic icon mirroring and automation, soft enforcement strategies for design consistency, and how to wield influence across hundreds of engineers with minimal headcount. This isn’t a story about building components—it’s about wiring them together at scale, with smart defaults, localization and directional and empathy.

Call it "kickstarting", "scaffolding", "bootstrapping" or simply "typing words in a terminal and getting files to start with", this is often the first opportunity for a framework to either delight or disappoint developers. How easily can they get up and running, can they extend it with their ideal toolchain and how well will it scale? In this talk we'll explore the limitations of current solutions and examine the ways we set out to improve the developer onboarding experience of Shopify's new Hydrogen React framework and SDK.