The very first version of the Atlassian Design System was about 20 static HTML files that I was hosting on a Mac Pro under my desk. There was no templating in these files, no version control, I had imported the CSS from our products, and I wrote the markup myself for each component.
This article was originally posted at:
https://medium.com/asana-design/the-key-lessons-i-learned-creating-a-popular-design-system-d078c817b4dd