I joined Cove Tool in 2018 as the first engineering hire alongside the CTO. The product was early-stage energy modeling software for architects and the team was tiny. When I looked at the frontend, I saw a Django app doing the heavy lifting for a workflow that really needed to feel dynamic and responsive. I proposed switching to React. The CTO agreed, and I learned React on the job while integrating it with the existing Django backend.
The Problem
As Cove Tool expanded, new pages kept getting added, more simulation views, more input forms, more graphs showing energy data. And every new feature meant rebuilding variations of the same components: similar input fields, the same graph layouts, matching styles. There was no shared source of truth, so the same UI kept getting duplicated.
The Insight
I brought the idea to the team: what if we extracted the components we were already building into a shared library, grounded in Cove Tool's own design language? One set of building blocks every engineer could pull from instead of rebuilding from scratch.
We named it EBrik -> Electronic Bricks. The name came from a coffee shop near Hurt Village in Atlanta where I used to work. Small pieces that snap together to build something larger.
What We Built
A React component library built on Cove Tool's design system, standardizing the components that already existed across the codebase and designing new ones with reusability in mind from the start. Documented, consistent, and easy to pull into any part of the product.
Impact
- Eliminated redundant component code across the frontend
- New features shipped faster. reuseable components.
- Consistent design language across the platform
- Became the standard for all new UI development at Cove Tool