Mike Aparicio

Three months ago, for reasons I won’t get into, I found myself suddenly taking care of my two sons by myself.

Hey!

May 12, 2026 Update: I refactored this to use mask-image instead of background-image so you can control the color of the mask with background-color instead of setting a fill on the SVG to match the surrounding background color.

This year was a tough one.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday.

My birthday was a few weeks ago and I was surprised when my best friend from high school, Eldridge, didn't call me.

Working on a design system for a single brand is challenging enough.

I'm so ready to turn the page on 2023.

Many years ago, before I started specializing in CSS and design systems, I held the job title of Webmaster — managing all aspects of a company's website.

It's been nine years since my daughter, Olivia, was born prematurely and I set out on my first Extra Life campaign, playing video games for 24-hours to raise money for Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago, where she was being treated.

When many devs think of CSS they think of Peter Griffin trying to open window blinds.

Our hearts are broken.

My son Ryan recently turned four years old and had a Super Mario-themed birthday.

I started my new role as Principal Design Systems Engineer at Turquoise Health just over a month ago and thought it might be useful/interesting to document my process of building a design system from scratch.

Imagine you’re a fan of a professional basketball team.

2022 seemed to be the year where things finally started to look up after years of Covid threw everyone's lives through a loop.

I've been talking with a lot of people about design systems recently.

Dan Mall tweeted some great advice for struggling design systems teams: Do less.

I'm currently working on a design systems documentation project that has some pretty extensive navigation requirements.

Three and a half years ago, our son Ryan was born.

It's been about two years since I last rebuilt my blog.

Sifu (PS4/PS5/PC) has already cemented itself as one of my top games of 2022.

I'm still reeling from 2020 and here we are in 2022.

There was once a time when I could check out a different video game every few weeks, burn through it, and move onto the next one.

In 2020 I set an ambitious goal of watching a movie a day for the entire year.

In my early days at Groupon, after building my first CSS framework for our internal tools, I was tasked with making a new one that would facilitate a redesign of Groupon.com.

I was looking for a way to incorporate search into the documentation site for Provi's design system, Fizz, which is built on Eleventy and hosted on Netlify.

There's been a convergence of media recently that has me feeling very introspective.

I'm really nailing these clickbaity social images. 😎 A few weeks ago a friend of mine, who is a therapist, was lamenting about the fact that she's been paying $60 a month to host her website through one of those companies that offers template websites for…

Between switching jobs and starting a bunch of side-projects, I've found myself re-writing a lot of CSS in the past year.

I probably don't have to go into great detail about all the ways 2020 sucked.

In the early 2000s, the Call of Duty series was just one of many first-person shooters set in World War II.

One month from today I'll be participating in my SEVENTH Extra Life, a 24-hour gaming marathon supporting local children's hospitals.

Last year, I reminisced about my time at Groupon, and wondered what might be next.

A few weeks ago we had a one-day hackathon at Groupon called Simple Groupon.

If you're not one of the 13+ million people playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, surely you know someone who is.

I've been kicking around a few ideas for posts recently, but it seemed a little bit silly to be writing about CSS or video games when the world is in the midst of a pandemic.

I recently received an email from PlayStation detailing my gaming "accomplishments" of 2019.

Where 2018 seemed to last an eternity, 2019 just whizzed on by.

For the last five years, I've been participating in Extra Life to raise money for Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago.

Netflix's Dark, which recently premiered its second season, answers the important question, "what if Stranger Things, but good?"

Recently, I was tasked with taking a very data-heavy site designed for desktop and making it responsive.

Caring for my infant son has started to get me thinking about what's next in my career.

I had all sorts of grand plans for how I was going to spend my time productively during my paternity leave, which ended today.

The Battle Royale genre is the latest craze in gaming and I'm pretty sure I hate it.

Last year I started blogging again after a four year absence.

I've been listening to podcasts regularly for over twelve years now, and my favorite one, The Slashfilmcast, just released its 500th episode.

As I've gotten older, each year seems to just fly by. 2018, on the other hand seemed like the longest year of my life.

I've spent the last month stressing over what to write here.

Working on a design system at a large company, I've noticed that depending on who you ask, they think the design system is something different.