Dexter / AEM

Overview

This is where the platform expertise started. Dexter was the AEM 6.5-based component platform powering adobe.com before the migration to Franklin and Edge Delivery Services — an enterprise-scale system serving millions of visitors across hundreds of marketing teams. I was early in my Adobe career, working alongside engineers who set the bar for how platform work gets done at this scale. The patterns learned here — owning surface area, thinking about downstream consumers, engineering for authoring as much as for the browser — are the same ones that drive the work today.

What I built

Flex Box grid system — partnered with Dexter’s engineering manager, one of the platform’s original architects, to build a CSS-based grid editor that let the CMS assemble custom page layouts without hand-written markup, keeping every layout lightweight and consistent across the platform.

Experience Fragment pattern templates (XF-Unwrap) — took Experience Fragments and turned them into reusable pattern templates that any team could drop onto a page across adobe.com, simplifying Global Web Production’s process down to swapping in content instead of rebuilding layout from scratch. Page creation time dropped from 2–3 hours to about 30 minutes — roughly an 80% cut — and the lighter-weight patterns helped lift performance scores.

Accessibility — platform-level accessibility fixes across components that had to be right for every team building on the system, not just individual pages.

Component engineering — componentizing adobe.com’s UI to align with Adobe’s unified Spectrum design system across a large, established codebase, plus carousel improvements and flex container layout work that gave content teams more authoring flexibility.

What I learned

Enterprise platform engineering at this scale has no room for “good enough for now.” Every component ships to hundreds of pages across dozens of teams — a rough edge in the platform becomes everyone’s problem. That standard shaped how I approach platform work now.