5/18/2026
Article 1
A 11-month post mortem on 110 job applications, 16 warm-channel touches, and 28 years of career history, run like a product retrospective. What the data said, what the machines ignored, and what I'm doing differently.
CMS-agnostic design system — proof of concept
The same Pink Moon token pipeline and DS components, running on Contentful and Vercel.
About this POC
This app is SUG-127 — a monorepo POC proving that the Sugartown design system is genuinely CMS-agnostic. The same components and token pipeline that power the Sanity-backed main site render this Contentful-backed app without modification.
Live POC (production): poc.sugartown.io
Live POC (preview/main): poc-preview.sugartown.io
Findings — what was agnostic, what needed an adapter, and what required a packaging fix — are documented in the coupling-point audit at docs/briefs/SUG-127-architecture-decisions.md.
Artifacts
Architecture Decision Record (15 decisions): docs/briefs/SUG-127-architecture-decisions.md
Shipped epic doc: docs/shipped/SUG-127-contentful-vercel-poc-platform-vendor-evaluation.md
Release notes v0.25.0: docs/release-notes/RELEASE_NOTES_v0.25.0.md
CHANGELOG entry [0.25.0]: CHANGELOG.md
DS component registry: sugartown.io/platform/design-system/registry
Schema ERD: sugartown.io/platform/cms#schema-erd
Article List
- 5/22/2026
Article 2
I built a design system without a design team. This is what I learned: The system works because of the structure, not because of AI. The judgment is always mine (or yours). The case for engineers and designers has never been stronger.
- 5/24/2026
Article 3
Sanity, Contentful, and Storyblok all let you build structured content. But they make fundamentally different bets about where schema definition should live: in code, in a database, or in a hybrid of both.