Design Systems Breakfast with Slava Shkodin

The Design Systems Breakfast featured Slava Shkodin, a Frontend Tech Lead with 15+ years of experience in frontend development!

Slava dove into: "Extending components in a safe manner. How to provide flexibility to a design system, while not sacrificing its strictness"

Why this mattered

"Flexibility vs. consistency" is one of the hardest design system tensions. If extension points are unclear or unsafe, teams either fork components or ship one-off UI... both paths slowly erode the system. Getting this right makes adoption easier, upgrades safer, and collaboration smoother.

The session was development-focused, but not hardcore. We welcomed other design system trades: designers, PMs, and any role, and valued everyone's input in the discussion.

It was another relaxed morning meetup with great conversation.

Event Details

📅 Date: January 8th, 2026 (Thursday)
🕘 Time:

• 10:00 EET (Helsinki, Tallinn, Athens)
• 9:00 CET (Berlin, Madrid, Stockholm)
• 8:00 GMT (London, Dublin)

Event Links

🔗 LinkedIn Event: http://linkedin.com/events/7407145974772662272/
🎟️ Luma Event: https://luma.com/pyj6pd1t

Artifacts

If you want to explore Slava's design system setup, here's the demo repository: https://github.com/smashercosmo/design-system-workshop

You can run pnpm storybook to see how everything works.