How we managed to move from Angular Material to Home cooked UI Components.
Jan 2020, I joined VComply as a software associate, I was quite surprised by the vastness of the whole platform. It is gigantic in size and equipped with tons of enterprise grade features. It took me 2 week to understand the basic vision and goal of the product and what problem it is trying to solve. The first day I got the responsibility to take over a mammoth size project, Once I started talking to other folks and engineering leaders, one thing I came to know is that we need faster execution.
At that time we were extensively using angular material for designing our interface and UI elements, at the same time our UX guy is so crazy that he wanted every UI component to look extraordinary and easy to use as the whole product's UX is quite impressive and unique. As we were not using and pre built template or design kit, we wanted everything of our own.
For Faster Execution we used Angular material, but soon we started realising problems with design and too much inter-connected design dependency as we are overriding the CSS of angular material component to a extreme level to fit our requirement, which resulted in too much design inconsistency and difficult to manage the whole platform.
Problem 2: As the Angular Material gets a newer version, some design problems start occurring as we upgrade our project.
Problem 3: Over dependence on Angular Material resulted in heavier Application, As we are using tons of elements from the material library indirectly increasing the application loading time.
Till Now we have realized we need to stop relying on third party libraries for our basic needs, and we need to have home cooked stuff as much as possible.
Now some of the UI and Frontend folks decided to take up the challenge and we started building our UI component one by one. At once we only build one component and replace the angular material component with our custom made component. This slow transition helped us in learning and implementing new stuff without taking too much risk of breaking up something major.
Today we have our own set of component libraries which can be customized as per our requirement and they are in our total control and now angular material is out of our projects package.json file, and even we are not facing the issue of heavier bundle size etc.
If you are a SaaS Product Org, and facing similar issues then feel free to reach us, we will be more than happy to help you.
Are you Angular Dev, and looking for some challenges like these, feel free to share your profile with me. For more opportunities do visit our career page as well: https://careers.v-comply.com/