UI/UX Developer· 2023

Cerbos

ReactUI/UXDevTools / SecurityRemixTailwind CSS

Overview

Cerbos is an access-control policy product aimed at engineers. I worked on both Cerbos Cloud, the cloud-hosted control plane for Cerbos Authorization Services, and the cerbos.dev marketing site, built with Remix and Tailwind CSS.

My role covered both frontend implementation as a React/Remix developer and UI/UX design, making a genuinely abstract concept (RBAC/ABAC policy authoring) legible without dumbing it down for a highly technical audience. Implementation was pixel-perfect against the design, not an approximation.

Cerbos access-control illustration: identities, policy engine, and actions — Identities, policies, and audited actions, the core of the product.

Migrating off MUI/Emotion to Tailwind

The app was built on Remix, and MUI's styling engine, Emotion, didn't support server-side rendering well on that stack at the time, causing hydration issues. The team needed a different styling approach, and since I had hands-on expertise in both MUI and Tailwind CSS, I architected the whole migration: designed the new Tailwind-based system, migrated all existing pages and screens onto it, and continued building new features directly on the new stack rather than treating the migration as a separate phase. It was one of the more complex projects I've worked on, and one where I used the framework's more advanced capabilities in full.

Cerbos Cloud Dashboard — Migrating off MUI/Emotion to Tailwind

Leading the project

I worked directly with the backend developers on this project, led sprint planning, and led two other frontend developers alongside me, actively reviewing their pull requests and planning the work at both macro (architecture, migration sequencing) and micro (day-to-day task) level.

Cerbos Cloud Playground: policy YAML editor with principal, resource, and actions panels — The Playground: authoring and testing access policies against real requests.

UI design

Beyond implementation, I was also part of the UI design side of the project, contributing to the design system itself and designing screens and pages, not just building to a finished spec handed over separately.

Cerbos color design tokens, light and dark mode, mapped from the Tailwind CSS v3 palette — The design token system: light/dark colour sets mapped onto Tailwind's palette.