Christophe Coutzoukis Design System Lead at Zapier
Chris Strahl:
Hi, and welcome to the Design Systems podcast. This podcast is about the place where design and development overlap. We talk with experts to get their point of view about trends in design, code, and how it relates to the world around us. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Knapsack. Check us out at knapsack.cloud. If you want to get in touch with the show, ask some questions, or generally tell us what you think. Go ahead and tweet us @TheDSPod. We'd love to hear from you.
Hey everyone. Chris here with the Design Systems Podcast. Today I'm with Christophe Coutzoukis. He manages the Design System Social Club, he's an ADPList mentor, spent tons of time working in design systems, kind of all over the place. You self-describe as a hybrid where you do a lot of design and engineering work. Welcome to the program. Stoked you're here.
Christophe Cout...:
Thanks, and thanks for having me, Chris. Very nice to be here today.
Chris Strahl:
We have this wonderful pattern of inviting people on that are French, that happen to have skills in both design and engineering. Why do you think that is? Why is it that we end up with so many people that either are from France or speak French in that design and engineering crossover?
Christophe Cout...:
So for the French part, I'm not so sure. One thing that I know though is at least for me being a hybrid, I think you are naturally interested in the design system world because it's just, there's not that many roles when you get to actually have still a foot in each world, like being in design and in development and making sure that you're still part of both worlds. There's not a ton of roles really where you get to do that and so I think that this is why I see a lot of hybrids naturally going in that path, in that career. For the French part, I don't know.
Chris Strahl:
Well, this is a good segue into the conversation. So we were talking a couple of weeks ago about how you got to where you are, which is an interesting and sort of fun story about intentionally or unintentionally creating a community in your wake of people that are interested in design systems and a lot of folks that are very much across disciplines that you like to work with. And so this is an episode that's really about that. It's about the creation of community. And I'm curious to know how you came to be in this position where you have this community that's really wonderful, that sprung up around you, and how that's really been a natural extension of who you wanted to work with? So tell us your story.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah, sure. We talked about it already. So yes, I'm French and a good chunk of my career was actually in France and actually in the same company for like 14 years, which seems crazy, but I basically evolved with the digital space. And so I started as a multimedia developer. So I think about building websites, flash games or flash applications, all that good stuff. And then I moved to become a webmaster when it meant that you were doing everything from design-
Chris Strahl:
I kind of missed that title, that was a fun title for a while.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah, but it also meant that you were covering a lot of ground, unfortunately. So I remember taking pictures, interviewing people, and filming them, and doing community management, and stuff like that. And to the point where I couldn't just do it all by myself, so I started to build a team around me. I ended up being the head of the web division there. It was really fun, especially because I was working for this national cultural institute in France about music, and I'm a musician, so obviously it was a great way to do both and be in a place where I was geeking out big time and also geeking out about music at the same time, which was very fortunate for me.
But the other reality was that especially at that time, I don't want to age myself, but that was some time ago. And so Twitter was already there, and that was kind of my sole source of what was happening because I was in France. In my company, I was the expert, which feels good most of the time. But at the same time, it's very isolating because nobody else know really what you're talking about or how you can improve stuff. And so I feel like the first community that I was part of, although much more of a stalker at that point, is just following the right people on Twitter was the one way for me to actually knowing what was happening. And obviously mostly geared towards Silicon Valley and this kind of stuff and this kind of people. And yeah.
Chris Strahl:
I always love a good social media story because there's so many bad social media stories. And I personally am not the best at social media, it's never been the place that's really pulled me in or that I've gravitated towards. But it's always great when you hear somebody that is basically feeling the sense, maybe not personally, but career-wise, of needing mentorship and going and finding the voices in their space that are talking about the things that they're interested in. And I think that's cool. That's a neat way, it's a good, positive, heartwarming story about using Twitter, which those are few and far between right now.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah, exactly. And I feel like probably at the beginning of Twitter it was more like that because you have this pattern in social media where when you have a new social media and people are willing to actually try it out, and it's a very small community at first, so that means also that people are very reachable at that point. So you can talk directly with that guy who wrote that book. If this is awesome, this is an opportunity for anybody to be able to get to the source directly. And obviously as the social media grows, then there's more and more people, more and more requests. So suddenly those thought leaders, wherever the field you are in, are less available because it doesn't scale. And so being there early is the right way to actually make connection, growing your network, but also have your questions answered directly by the right person.
Chris Strahl:
Yeah, no. As a sort of funny aside, I was a part of one of the early universities that got Facebook a little before most of the world got Facebook, and I remember really enjoying it back in the day. And then I always joke with my parents, and mom and dad, if you're listening to this, I'm sorry, my parents ruined Facebook for me, where the moment they were on there, I was like, "Oh, no, I got to be done with this." Yeah.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah. Well, my version of that story is the fact that, so my wife is American, obviously I'm French. And so she was on Facebook, and as you know, I want to say like a webmaster going in that thing, I was super interested about it when it was still locked to just colleges. And I was like, "I want to get in, tell me when it says when I can." And she was like, "Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure I want you to see all the pictures I was taking when it was just a college crowd." And seeing her, I don't know, partying hard with her friends or something like that. So I feel like I was on the other, basically both side of this, I was like, "I want in." And then they were like, "Oh, I am out. I'm so out."
Chris Strahl:
Gone.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah.
Chris Strahl:
So you find this community via Twitter, a lot of that community is based in Silicon Valley in California. Where do things go from there?
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah. So at some point, again, because my wife is American, she works for Google Paris at that time, and then she has a job opportunity in the Silicon Valley, so Google HQ. Cool, great gig. And we always said like, "One day we would love to try to see what we like best, living in France or living in the US." So we're like, "Well, that's finally one clear opportunity." And given what I do, Silicon Valley is probably the best place in the US for me to find a job. Okay, cool.
And this is when I started to have another experience with communities because suddenly I was in Silicon Valley and I was able to just go to meetups and meet in person the people that I was following on Twitter and their blogs and stuff like that. And well, the French connection is at it again, but I remember distinctively one of the first meetups that I went was the Sass meetups, so it's Sass Mixin. And one of the first person that I met there was Kaelig, so Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, which is now the co-lead of the Design Token W3C, what is it, Working Group?
Chris Strahl:
Yeah. He was just on the podcast too. I'm really glad you said his last name and not me. Sounds better when you say it.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah. And so again, take it from me who basically I'm guessing we're not that many people, but he wrote a book about maintaining CSS and Sass in French. And I read his book before meeting him. And so this was so funny and somewhat incredible because obviously very small community, very small group of people, but at the same time you're like, "Hey, I read your book and I can talk to you directly about it and ask you questions and stuff like that." So that was great.
But in that meetup, I think I met Jina Anne, I met Hampton Catlin, the actual creator of Sass. I think I met not the first one, but again, Sass Mixin, I met Nathan Curtis. It was just a great opportunity to meet all those people that I was following for years and being able to say, "Hey, cool, I can ask you a question and we can talk about stuff and you are interested in what I have to say too." And it just feels great to be able to actually be part of that community.
Chris Strahl:
It's interesting too, to basically be able to meet these folks that are doing the thing that you look at as mentors, that you look at as the early leaders of this community. I think it's also funny that it wasn't even really a design system meetup. It was something that was tangential to it, but the ability to go and chat with all those people and spend time around them, I assume the feeling there was pretty cool.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah. And I want to actually make a parallel with my previous job back in France, because again, I was working for this cultural, it's a national cultural institute about music, which means that there were concerts, which means that there were internationally renowned artists coming to play there. And I'm part of the crew. I'm backstage, I'm interviewing people or taking pictures for the website or all that stuff. And this is also where you basically understand that all those people that you can admire in some ways because they wrote this book that is brilliant, or they make that talk that is great, or they are renowned artists.
Cool, they're on stage, there's the spotlight, everybody's applauding them and stuff like that. Cool. The next minute when they're exiting the stage and you are backstage and it's poorly lit and they're exhausted and it's the end of their day and they want to take a shower or go to the bathroom, instantly they become human again. And that's basically the parallel that I want to make is that yes, of course you can meet brilliant people that are really making things move and thought leader and stuff like that. But I think it basically also taught me that those people are human. They can be your friends too, or you can have just a normal conversation with those people because they're like you.
And so I think that part of my energy or my will to make communities is also to, I don't know if it's the right word in English, but de-sacralize the fact that all those thought leaders or people that've done awesome stuff, they're struggling too. They have problems, they're not perfect. And so it is all about like, "Hey, we're all humans and we're all in it together and we can talk to each other." It's fun, it's normal.
Chris Strahl:
Thank you, by the way, for being understanding that my five-year-old was melting down and didn't want to go to school today and that's why I was 10 minutes late too, starting this podcast recording.
Christophe Cout...:
But that's my point, right? It's like we're humans.
Chris Strahl:
Yeah, no, real life happens around the curated social media feeds. And I think that that's one of the things that I've always really struggled with community is there is this kind of twofold thing. I was in the Drupal community for a long time, and I remember the first time I met Dries, the creator of Drupal. And that was an intimidating moment for me. I was very early on in my career, I was in my early 20s, I didn't really know what I was doing yet in the web space. And he was a very welcoming, kind person. And then I ended up working for him for almost three years.
And in those moments of authenticity, that's where you kind of find that sense of community. I think that the more curated stuff, it's useful. You learn things on Twitter, you learn things from blogs, you learn things surfing medium and reading interesting articles. But where that connection happens, that's when you go and sit and have a beer and see that person maybe with some bags under their eyes talking about how hard it is to start a company or how much they've been struggling with getting adoption of design tokens or something like that.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah. And the other thing to think about is, or just to remind you of, is that it's not because you're an expert in one domain, that you are an expert in every domain. And so basically those people that are expert in that domain probably have a thing or two to learn from you. It's been long time since I think, and I'm going to be maybe a nerd about this, but I think [inaudible 00:13:38] was the last personally to be all science kind of expert, where he was a mathematician, a philosopher doing all this stuff and all the research and stuff like that, it's long gone since somebody, a human, can actually be all those things at the same time.
And so you also have to remember that if you're an expert in one domain, you still have things to learn from other people. I think it just levels out everybody and say, "Yeah, we're all know stuff and ignorant of other stuff, and that's normal." Or at least for me the point is we should learn from each other constantly.
Chris Strahl:
No, I completely agree. It's one of the reasons why I love doing this. It's funny now. People recognize me, mostly recognize my voice because there's not a lot of video of me on the internet, but they'll recognize my voice from the podcast and they'll be like, "Oh, hey, you're the host of the Design Systems Podcast." And I'm always a little embarrassed by that. It makes me uncomfortable a little bit because I don't want that to be the persona I project. I'd rather be much more who I am authentically, not that this podcast is inauthentic. But then there's all of this other wonderful stuff where I get to talk to people like you and all these other people in this great community and really start to build something around that, where ideally we learn from each other and we're in this situation where we make a community better.
It's also why we really try to keep this podcast somewhat separate from the Knapsack side of things. I don't talk a lot about the company that I've started on this largely because I want this to feel like a learning moment between people having a conversation. And that's how I think about building community. But you've done a lot of this too, and what I really want to understand is we talked a lot about like, "Okay, this is how I participated in communities," but you've actually also built a lot of these yourself. So talk to me about how you made this transition from this guy that just arrived in Silicon Valley, meeting all these incredible people, to actually starting these things yourself because I think that's also really interesting.
Christophe Cout...:
Okay, sure. Well, when I'm thinking about it, I think there's a couple of things at play. One, I think maybe the most important one is that my love language professionally is to share knowledge. And so when I learn something cool, I want to share it with somebody else. Through my career, I've met a ton of people that are passionate or specialized in one thing or another. Every time I see something cool in that field, I will reach out to them and say, "Hey, I found this thing. It's pretty cool. Do you know it? What do you think? Check it out."
Maybe it's because also back in France when I was just a receiver in that isolating spot where I didn't have a lot of people to talk to, but it's my natural inclination to just share that knowledge with people. I see something interesting, I want them to know too, and I think it's all about sharing knowledge. So that's one.
Second part is I'm also a musician and I am not shy to be on stage, I'm not shy to talk and basically be the front man. And so I feel like driving a community is also somewhat like being in the forefront and trying to build stuff. When you build a band, it's actually a lot of work, but it's also like... Or at least the way I see it, is that when I was leading bands, it was never to be the star. It was like I wanted to build a good band, making good music. There's nothing better for me than being on stage when it clicks between everybody. You know you're doing something great, you can have eye contact and everybody's smiling because you're doing something awesome. And then you also have the feedback from the crowd and people are actually digging what you're doing. This is the best for me. There's nothing that tops that feeling at that moment.
And so it's, again, all about creating something together. I think that's really what drives me. And like I said, I'm not shy to present people and present stuff and being in the spotlight. I've done that since I was, what? 15 or 16, something like that. I make mistakes, like not find my words or stuff like that or mispronounce something. It's all right, it's okay, I'll move on. And the show would go on and stuff like that. That's that.
Now, very practically at that time, I started to also selfishly and a little bit laziness for me, but... So I'm in the Silicon Valley, I'm actually in the South Bay of the Silicon Valley, and most of the meetups that are happening are in San Francisco, and the traffic is just horrendous. It's like you have to drive for at least an hour to just get there for the Sass Mixin or for that meetup.
By the way, one of the greatest experience that I had as a community for design systems specifically is the Design System Wednesdays, that was first created by a guy called Alby Barber. So Alby, if you hear this, thanks, because that was awesome what you did there. And it was very informal. Just I want to make sure that I'll say that too, because Alby created it, but now it's actually run by Maria Eguiluz. I hope I pronounce your last name correctly, Maria. I apologize in advance if I didn't. But this Design System Wednesdays is very informal. It's basically a monthly meetup for design system practitioner.
There's no agenda. We just meet on a Zoom call or before we were actually, it was even better because before COVID, we were meeting every month in a different company, and it was just between anywhere between five people and 30 people in different companies each time in a big conference room. And we were just chatting and showing each other what we were working on and talking about the struggles that we had and stuff like that. So that was great.
Chris Strahl:
The way you speak about that, it makes me really feel like you miss it a lot.
Christophe Cout...:
Well, it's online and it's still active. So it was actually yesterday, the last one, so I was there.
Chris Strahl:
Yeah, but the idea of going from place to place and kind of like-
Christophe Cout...:
Oh yeah, that was awesome.
Chris Strahl:
... seeing people where they are. I personally, I really miss that too. There's a little projection there, certainly, where I miss meeting people in their environment, talking about the stuff live. Zoom is great, other tools are great. It's not quite the same though.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah. Well, for me, it's two things. One is in-person meeting is just so much better for communication, but also being able to check out each other places, offices, companies, how you do things. "Oh yeah, I like the architecture of this building," or something like that. Just going to a new place I think is fun. But to go back to my previous point, most of the time it was pretty far away and I was like, "Wait a minute. We're South Bay. There's a lot of major companies, startups and stuff like that that are here. Why don't we have more meetups in the area for people that are here? And so we don't have to actually commute to San Francisco or San Jose every time we want to meet." And so this is when I started to make that idea like, "I want to create my own meetup."
And so I did, and it was called The Interface, and it was for designers and developers, and the company that I was at at that point, ThoughtSpot, they were actually kind enough and willing to actually sponsor the whole thing. It was a monthly meetup, I invited guests to talk. And then I also tried to design the meetup a little bit. So you had like a first part where somebody was talking about something, Q&A, pretty classic. And then, after that we also had somewhat of a network event, so there was a couple of things that you could do. There was this collaborative art project where it was just like a big whiteboard and everybody who came, if you had a sticker that was not already on the board, you can just add it to the thing. So month after month it grew and stuff like that.
The other thing that was I think pretty cool is that we had different tables, and on each table we had a conversation starter, so you had a theme for that table. So if you wanted to talk about accessibility, you knew you can go directly to that table. And that was because I hate the fact that when you are in a networking event and you don't know anybody, and you just have their names, and it's kind of like a hit or miss, it's like, "Hey-"
Chris Strahl:
"What do you want to talk about?"
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah, and I'm a backend engineer, I'm like, "This is cool. I mean, I love that for you, but I have nothing to tell you. I'm so different from you that I'm happy to meet you, but at the same time I feel like we're going to kind of struggle to get to an interesting spot, whether jump-starting the conversation was just a good way for me to just get things going." And so I did that for a while at that company. And to be honest with you, there were multiple reason to make that happen. It's like you grow your network, you can maybe recruit people for the company that I was working for, it's a great way to grow the people there because every new meetup was a good occasion to know more about the theme that we were talking about, things like that. It was for designers and developers.
And the last thing, it was actually putting our company on the map in Silicon Valley because it's like, "Hey, we're still a startup and we're pretty new and nobody really knows us." So it was a great way to get the brand out and stuff like that. And yeah, it was pretty successful. I think when COVID hit, I stopped, but it was over 500 people from that area. And so it's like, "Is it a big number, a small number?" The point is that every month there were a good crowd.
Chris Strahl:
And at some point the numbers don't really matter all that much, right?
Christophe Cout...:
Yep.
Chris Strahl:
It's about the idea of getting the people that want to be together talking about this stuff, taking time out of their day. I mean, it's funny, the last time I was deeply involved in meetups, I had one child and did not yet have a funded startup company. And so the idea of what it would look like then versus now, and the time commitment of the people that would come to those conversations. But I mean, think this drives the purpose. People taking time out of their lives and their day to share knowledge with one another. And if people get value out of it, meetups grow and more people come and they connect with one another. And that's where the magic happens.
I think that this kind of drives at why all this stuff matters. And a big part of the reason why I wanted you to be on here to tell your story is we've all kind of been missing this sense of community now for a little while and I really desperately want to restart that. And we're trying in little ways, Knapsack, we run the Patterns conference. And we've been trying to do a bunch of local Patterns events with folks like Meta in San Francisco. We've had an event in Chicago, we're about to have one in Portland. But trying to really figure out a way that we can help in the community to provide that sponsorship to help people start an event.
And so if you're interested, hit us up. I'd be curious to talk to you about, you or any of our listeners, about how we restart these things because I view this as essential for the success of design systems. You talking about that meetup in San Francisco where you met all these amazing people and that's kind of led you to where you are now, I think there's a lot of people that are absent that at this moment, and I'd love to start to see this stuff pop up in-person a lot more again.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah. I think it's interesting because, well, first of all, that's kind of what I tried to do after. So the interface died because of COVID and I actually changed jobs and stuff like that. And I was at that point also relying heavily on another community, which was started by Jina Anne, is the Design System Slack Workspace, which is probably the most thriving, I think, Slack community around design system by far. There's thousands of people now that are on that network. And so I basically had this support group that I made. Ultimately, they're my friends now, but it's very also funny how it started, because again, Design System Wednesdays is every month, it's in a different location, and it turns out that there's just a group of friends that we were pretty much all the same in the same area.
So we started to say, "Hey, do you want a carpool? Because it's stupid to have the five of us driving five cars to go to exactly the same place." So we started to do a design system carpool, karaoke kind of vibe. And so I had those friends. And then we were more or less every day talking together on that Slack group, having our private discussion, all five of us. And we all work in different companies at different roles, but we're all struggling with design systems in the same way, so we were just asking each other, but it is really like a support group.
And at some point we were like, "Well, I think other people could benefit from the conversation that we have because we have enough interesting people here have different background, different opinions, different roles, different companies." And so this is when I feel like, I don't even remember who got the idea first, but we were like, "Hey, maybe we should do a podcast about it." And then this idea moved on to like, "Hey, let's do a live stream." It's like, "Let's do it live so people can actually ask us questions directly." So that's how the Design System Social Club was born.
But the idea was to say, "Hey, real talk, the vibe is that I'm not the one who is going to tell you how it is. I don't know, but I have questions too and I have my own experience." And I have people coming to the show and we have a theme and stuff like that, but we all give our own opinion about this. And the idea is to make it real. It's like everybody's struggling, don't think that somebody had all figured it out, because that's not true. Even at Google, even at Shopify, even at a place where you have all those big names and big design systems, yeah, of course they've done incredible work, but that doesn't mean that they know everything, far from it. And they're also struggling. And so the idea was to say, "Hey, look at us. We're also trying to figure it out together and ask us questions." And so that was the idea of the Design System Social Club. Now, it was very grassroots-oriented, it's just pretty much like me now at that point.
Chris Strahl:
It's just a bunch of people that wanted to get together in front of a microphone. I totally understand that.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah. But that said, this has been on pause now for some time because I also noticed that there is more and more content that actually also sponsored by Knapsack, for example, you have way more means than me by myself. So it's not like I want to stop, but I was like, "Hey, I need to figure out a new way to actually engage with people." And this is also where I started to do more mentorship on the ADPList platform. And so it's like a one-on-one. It's nice, and I want to say two third of the mentor session that I have is around design system and people trying to figure out how they need to do this? Okay, cool.
But that doesn't really scale. So I'm back at, should I do some kind of office hours where people can come and ask questions and have, again, guests that can answer? Because I don't want to be the only, I don't know, I would feel weird to just be the only one who has knowledge and can tell you about stuff. But this idea of I need to reinvent the way because just talking about one topic, if I do another like, "Hey, accessibility and design system, this is super cool and I talk about it for hours, but I feel like there's other players now that can do this kind of stuff, and maybe I can do something that is more direct and more like Q&A or office hours kind of vibe."
Chris Strahl:
No, absolutely. I would love to collaborate on something like that. I think that this gets into the last thing that I wanted to hit on is how we think about growing and evolving this community. How do we elevate other people's voices? I mean, look, my stake in this is like, yes, I have a startup that sells software related to design systems, but my stake in this is one of the happiest career pathways I ever took on was being a part of a pretty large and substantial open source community. And I loved that.
And it was really, really great to connect with those people and to build genuine, real, authentic friendships based on the people you work around. And to also have all those people not have the same logo on their shirt when they'd all get together in the same place. And so for me, I agree, there's a lot more corporate voices in the space of design systems now, more than there's ever been.
I want to try to figure out how to maintain some of that ideology or some of that identity as something that is distinct from my startup, but as a member of this community, and I'm completely down to collaborate around that. And please, if you're listening to this and you have ideas for collaboration, let me know because I also struggle with like, "What form does this take?" The podcast has been great, and I love doing this work. This is some of the highlights of my week is when I get to record episodes like this. But trying to figure out how we actually get into people's cities and into people's office buildings without necessarily a mic and an internet connection, I'm interested in that too.
And so trying to figure out what we do, I feel like that local commitment is important of getting the people in your local area and in your local community. And I also think about figuring out how you can have something that, look, this ends up being a pretty two-way conversation. We talk with each other, we learn from each other, and then we send that out into the world, and hopefully other people get value out of it and learn from it. But how do we have those things in a more forum-based, or like you said, office hours-based format? All these are great ideas of where this goes and it also gives us opportunities as the people that are building it to elevate the people that really help make it special.
Christophe Cout...:
I think it's interesting and somewhat meta, because ultimately design systems are about building a community in your own organization. So it just makes sense for people interested in design systems to actually be part of communities, because ultimately that's really what we're doing. And so when you have people like Jina Anne saying, "Hey, design systems are for people," that's the point, right? It's like the idea is to create a community, a mind hive. It's like how do we make people work together between different roles? And I often compare my role as a design system lead as a head coach of a professional team. It's like the idea is that I'm not going to tell you how to be a good developer, that's not my role. My role is to make sure that I give you the tools and resources to actually work well as a team altogether and to be successful together.
And so again, the idea is building community, making sure that people feel included and feel safe, and they can talk, and they can participate and contribute back to the system. This is all community. I mean, to me, it makes sense that design system communities are things that should be thriving because well, that's what we're about actually in the end. And the other thing that I just wanted to say is that when I said there's more and more basically companies that are sponsoring stuff, I think it's good, it's great. It's just that they have the means to actually do stuff of quality. When I feel like apart from Jina, who created Clarity from scratch on their own, probably on our own dime, I don't know how she does it, but I can't.
Chris Strahl:
It's an unbelievable undertaking.
Christophe Cout...:
Yeah, exactly. So what is the expression, tip on my hat or something like that?
Chris Strahl:
A hat tip.
Christophe Cout...:
A hat Tip to her, because this is incredible. And also, she's an incredible community leader because I feel like the Design System Slack Community, it's great, it's inclusive. People are actually not assholes, you don't encounter a bad interaction. Maybe I would just went lucky, but I feel like overall this community is actually good people talking.
Chris Strahl:
I completely agree. I've had almost entirely positive interactions with people that have been a part of design systems. And the eagerness and the willingness to learn, I think that that's why it's important that we continue to grow this.
Christophe Cout...:
So yeah, to go back to your point, it's like if we can combine this appetite from design system people to actually build more events and stuff like that and combine that with the means of companies and stuff that are willing to sponsor this kind of stuff, yeah, I think we can actually get to a very interesting place for sure.
Chris Strahl:
Well, hey, Christophe, really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming in and telling us your story, talking about community with me. And I'm really looking forward to collaborating with you, I think this is going to be a lot of fun. So let's stay in touch and maybe the next month or so, let's try to get in front of a mic again in a different format and see what we can experiment with.
Christophe Cout...:
Oh, I'm game, definitely game. Thanks, Chris, for having me. And as usual, talking about design system is probably the highlight of my day, so thanks for having me.
Chris Strahl:
Awesome. Well, hey, have a great rest of your week. Thanks for listening, everybody. Catch you later.
That's all for today. This has been another episode of the Design Systems podcast. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like to know more about, find us on Twitter @TheDSPod. We'd love to hear from you with show ideas, recommendations, questions, or comments. As always, this pod is brought to you by Knapsack. You can check us out at knapsack.cloud. Have a great day.
