Josh Black
Senior Software Engineer, Design Systems at GitHub
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJosh Black is a Senior Software Engineer specializing in design systems with 11 years of experience, currently building GitHub’s Design System after a core contributor role on IBM’s Carbon Design System. He blends front-end craftsmanship and performance-minded architecture—improving load times, accessibility, and testability—while shipping practical API and build optimizations like ESM support and tree-shaking for widely used repos such as primer/octicons and primer/react. Based in Austin, he has a track record of scaling design systems across large organizations and modernizing component libraries and testing stacks. Notably, he moves beyond UI polish to tackle developer experience issues—refactoring test configurations, removing unsafe patterns, and streamlining theme/runtime behavior—to make systems easier to maintain and consume.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at University of Florida
English, Spanish, French
Stackoverflow
999reputation
108kreached
12answers
8questions
Github Skills (34)
javascript10
component-design10
jes10
css10
typescript10
system-design10
carbon-design-system10
ui-design10
carbon-copy10
system10
uid10
carbon-lang10
component-library10
front-end-development10
jestjs10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
primer/react
Aug 2022 - Jan 2023
An implementation of GitHub's Primer Design System using React
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:1502 reviews, 152 commits, 1496 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Josh contributed to the implementation of the GitHub Primer Design System using React. They added features to the `ThemeProvider` component, including adding dark and light aliases, and implemented tests for these changes. The user also refactored and updated test configurations to use `@testing-library/react` and performed several refactoring tasks like inlining react-polymorphic and updating circular import references. This included several updates for accessibility features.
primerreactprimer-designdesign-systemcomponent-library
carbon-design-system/carbon-website
Sep 2019 - Jul 2022
The website for the Carbon Design System.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:270 reviews, 71 commits, 130 PRs in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Josh primarily contributed to the front-end development of the Carbon Design System website. Their commits focused on updating UI components, improving the visual presentation, and enhancing the overall user experience. The user worked on adjusting the markup, spacing, and styling of various elements like overview cards, and icon library components. Furthermore, the commits demonstrate the addition of images, supporting code, and modifications to improve overall site functionality, including search and sorting enhancements.
gatsbyreactcarbon-design-systemibmdesign-system
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.