Jaelyn Brown shares her experience as an Early Career Program Manager Intern with a focus on developing engagement for HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions).

“Cloud 100 leaders from Algolia, Figma, Gong​.io, and Papaya Global share their stories from the trenches as they offer both strategic and tactical advice to founders on building enduring businesses.”

To celebrate 10 years of Figma, Dylan Field shares 10 physical objects from Figma’s history that are special to him. The beta notebook and WebGL coffee table are my favorites!

Forbes’ Cloud 100 is a list of the world’s top private cloud companies. Figma keeps climbing higher and higher in this rating — this year it’s #5 on the list, after being #7 last year and #29 in 2020.

In light of the sad news of InVision layoffs, Nathan Barry tried to answer the question of what made Figma so successful that it completely changed the design tools landscape.

The founder of Cron wondered about this question, and Figma’s Design Director Noah Levin came up with some great links in replies.

Fantastic article by Shirley Miao about the complexities and hidden challenges of building Figma’s dark mode: ​“We wanted to build a solution that wouldn’t just solve the existing need for a new feature, but would be flexible enough to scale with us as the product evolved. Doing so would make it easier to onboard new engineers, tackle unforeseen challenges, and introduce new themes down the road. The trick was developing an approach that would be easy to implement and maintain, while also ensuring that it was regression proof.”

“On this FINITE Podcast, Jesus Requena, VP Growth Marketing at Figma, shares how reducing customer churn is, yes, about recapturing the interest of waning users, but also about acquiring the right users in the first place.”

I’m not a big fan of Sketch’s ​“Sketch vs Figma” page, but I had a big laugh over this. Highly resourceful.

Bersabel Tadesse, Product Manager at Figma, writes about building and releasing last week’s updates — Figma widgets, a new toolbar menu, Community improvements, and redesigned API docs.

Another cool artifact from William Wu’s work on spring animations.

Love this behind-the-scenes video of Nikolas Klein and William Wu from Figma experimenting with how fast they can set a spring animation based on a feeling.

A couple of weeks ago, Figma experienced its worst service disruption to date. This postmortem by their engineering leaders is a very transparent look at what happened and the steps they are taking to prevent it in the future: ​“The incident was caused by a bug in AWS’s ElastiCache service with Cluster Mode enabled. The bug is such that high Publish / Subscribe workloads can trigger a sudden and sustained spike in Engine CPU utilization. Due to the complex nature of this bug, we did not hit it for weeks despite having moved our Publish / Subscribe workloads to a Clustered-Mode Enabled Redis instance much earlier.”

This deep dive into the making of the feature is my favorite kind of a blog post on Figma’s blog: ​“Building spring animations took our engineering team back to the classroom — to make animations that are both natural and accurate, we borrowed principles from physics. We’re excited to share the mechanics behind the movement, and the story of how spring animations bounced their way into Figma.”

Layout FM podcast host Rafa is joined by special guests Joel and Oscar from Figma to talk about their work designing AutoLayout V4.

An interview with Thierry Blancpain, co-founder of Grilli Type, one of the font foundries that were a part of Figma’s variable fonts beta.

Apparently, there is a poem by Robert Frost in Figma’s source code.

Damien Correll, Creative Director at Figma, shares how the branding for 4th Config came together.

Ryhan talks about designing Figma’s dark mode and rebuilding their entire color system.

Figma’s Design Director Noah Levin introduces Product Designers and UX Writers who worked on new features. Great place to discover new talented people to follow!