Project Details#
DreeSuite was an internal home-building configurator used by Drees Homes teams to manage builds, selections, and options across projects. I served as both tech lead and de facto designer on the application, setting the front-end direction and introducing the visual foundations the product had been missing.
Framework Evaluation#
The team was using AngularJS when Google announced Angular, a near-complete rewrite with breaking API changes. Rather than migrate directly and risk repeating the same problem, I made the case to leadership that this was the right moment to evaluate frameworks broadly instead of staying locked to one team's release roadmap.
We evaluated React but had concerns about its ecosystem dependency model. A framework that relied on third-party packages for routing and state management meant those packages had to keep pace independently, a real risk if any fell behind or diverged from the core. Vue won out for two reasons:
- API closeness to the platform: Vue's templating model maps closely to plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, lowering the learning curve and making it easier to bring developers up to speed.
- A progressive, self-contained ecosystem: the router, state management, and tooling are all optional but maintained by the same core team, so supplemental libraries will always work with Vue without depending on outside maintainers.
We adopted TypeScript during this same period, choosing it over Flow, which Facebook was pushing at the time. The reasoning was consistent: a tool with broad community adoption and no dependency on a single organization's roadmap.
Proof of Concept#
To make the case concrete, a back-end engineer and I built a proof of concept in two days while our manager was on vacation: a health monitoring application for our self-maintained servers and services, built in Vue with company branding and basic status displays. The speed and clarity of the result was the point. We presented it to our manager as a demonstration of how quickly Vue let us ship something real and well-structured. That shifted the conversation from whether to consider Vue to how to move forward with it.
Design System Foundations#
With no dedicated designer on staff, I took on the design responsibility for DreeSuite. I introduced color theory, CSS variables, and reusable utility classes to give the product a consistent visual foundation it had not had before. That work became the basis of an early design system for internal tooling at Drees Homes.
About Drees Homes#
Drees Homes is a multi-billion dollar private homebuilder founded in 1928, building new homes across the United States. DreeSuite supported the internal teams that managed the operational side of that construction pipeline.