Here’s a quick follow-up to some of the conversations I had following my talk at Converge 2025.

I mentioned that the right kind of laziness can be a virtue in a developer.

To explain this, I turn to Terry Pratchett. Writing in his 1990 book ‘Moving Pictures’ of Victor Tugelbend, an aspiring student wizard1, he describes…

Ordinary laziness was merely the absence of effort. Victor had passed through there a long time ago, had gone straight through commonplace idleness and out on the far side. He put more effort into avoiding work than most people put into hard labour.

This may not seem a particularly welcome quality of anyone, let alone a Design Systems engineer. However, later, Pterry expounds…

People who didn’t apply themselves to the facts in hand might have thought that Victor Tugelbend would be fat and unhealthy. In fact, he was undoubtedly the most athletically-inclined student in the University. Having to haul around extra poundage was far too much effort, so he saw to it that he never put it on and kept himself in trim.

This is the philosophy that drives much of my work as a developer. I will spend no end of effort now to save effort later.

Design Tokens are a fine example of this in action. As a community, we decided to put the effort into moving from something easy (throwing raw values around) to something simple2. For a little extra up-front effort, downstream work became that much simpler.

But I believe there are depths of laziness yet unplumbed in the field of Design Systems, especially in the communication structures between designers and developers, and no effort shall be spared until we’ve made this relationship as lazy as possible.

  1. Aspiring, that is, to remain a student wizard. Look, just read the book OK? ↩

  2. For insight into the difference between simple and easy, please watch Rich Hickey’s talk Simple Made Easy ↩