TJ VanToll

TJ VanToll

TJ VanToll is a front-end developer, author, and a Principal Developer Advocate for Progress. TJ has over a decade of web development experience, including a few years working on the jQuery and NativeScript teams. Nowadays, he helps web developers build awesome UIs with KendoReact.
React Summit 2020React Summit 2020
8 min
Why Paid UI Components Aren’t Evil
In this talk I’m going to convince you that paid UI components will solve all your problems, and that you should immediately give me all of your money. Maybe. Or perhaps I’ll draw on my experience working both on free and open source tools (jQuery, jQuery UI, NativeScript), as well as paid tools (Kendo UI, KendoReact), and discuss which type of tool makes sense depending on your team and needs. In any case the talk will go fast because lightning is in the title.
JSNation Live 2021JSNation Live 2021
8 min
Building a Custom Component Library – Fast
If your company is anything like the ones I’ve worked for, you have apps with seven different button designs, three different datepickers, and a bizarre collection of dropdowns that may or may not be accessible. A growing trend to deal with this inconsistency is to build a custom design system or component library. Essentially, you build The One Way™ to create a datepicker for your organization, and ask that the rest of your company to conform to your new system. But building a component library comes with a lot of challenges, like, which frameworks or libraries should you use (if any)? How do you make sure your components are accessible? And how to you distribute your components so your whole company can use them? In this lightning talk you’ll learn how to build a component library fast building on top of a library like Kendo UI. You’ll learn tips & tricks on how to get up and running, how to customize components, and how to distribute components throughout your organization.