Date pickers are hard, whodathunk it

Due to the new job I've given myself permission to consume even more design systems related content. In doing so I listened to a recent Syntax FM episode featuring the folks from Shoelace, now Web Awesome, where they talked about joining up with Font Awesome and their Kickstarter:

Web Awesome with Konnor Rogers + Cory LaViska - Syntax #758

Corey Laviska, creator of Shoelace, and Connor Rogers, Shoelace contributor, discuss reinventing Shoelace as Web Awesome under the Font Awesome umbrella. They talk about the Font Awesome Kickstarter success, wanting to avoid framework churn, and building Web Awesome as an open source UI library focused on web components.

Syntax

Their discussion around date pickers stood out to me, especially after working on one myself as part of the Nord Design System team. Shoelace, despite having over 50 components, has never had a date picker… and I'm not surprised! Date pickers are hard. I recall my colleague Nick Williams spending considerable amounts of time getting the accessibility of Nord's date picker just right. Ok, I confess, I didn't build our date picker but I did do plenty of refactors and I'm very ok with that.

Funnily enough Nick has somewhat recently open sourced a set of calendar themed Web Component called 'Cally', which I would highly recommend checking out if you're in need of one. It's packed with features as well as Nick's many years of personal experience in accessibility, Web Components and rocking in a darkened corner over building date pickers:

Cally: small, feature-rich calendar components

Open source calendar components for selecting single dates or date ranges. Framework-agnostic, themeable, localizable, accessible.

Cally