Build a React Component Library

A component library is how a development team ensures consistency across a product — the same Button, Card, and Modal everywhere, with the same behavior and appearance. Building one teaches the highest-level React design skills: composability, prop API design, accessibility, and the tradeoffs between flexibility and constraint. It also produces something genuinely useful that outlasts the session and compounds in value as more components are added.

The session covers planning the component inventory (which components are actually needed, not which are interesting), setting up the project with TypeScript and Storybook for visual testing, building components in order of dependency (tokens first, then primitives, then compositions), writing usage documentation, and publishing for team access. The documentation step is often omitted in early library projects and always regretted: a component without documentation gets used incorrectly, defeating the consistency the library was built to create.

Accessibility from the start is the constraint this plan enforces, because retrofitting it is significantly harder than building it initially. Semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, ARIA attributes, and focus management are considered at the component level, where they're most efficiently implemented. After this session, you'll have a clear architectural pattern for component API design — what should be configurable by the consumer, what should be fixed by the library, and how to make that boundary explicit through TypeScript.