Tinned Fruit Missives July 2018
Yes, yes, I know that we’re already in the second-half of July. I’ve been distracted by incredible weather, holidays and a certain global soccer tournament, OK?
As such, these links are at least two weeks old and maybe up to 7 weeks old. How will you cope with being so out of date?
Worse, I’ll be sending you another of these in just a couple more weeks.
– Jim
The Cult of the Complex - Jeffrey Zeldman
Old Jeff gets on his slightly higher-than-thou high horse again, but as usual also makes some good points. This boils down to an expanded discussion of the importance of keeping the Principle of Least Power in mind and not allowing developer-optimised dogma to determine the best approach for your users.
5 Red Flags Signaling Your Rebuild Will Fail - Ken Kantzer
Read it and weep if you’re currently rebuilding something. This might make uncomfortable reading for those who have embarked optimistically on a rebuild project and got unstuck half way through as it becomes clear that it’s much harder than hoped.
Prioritizing “Non-Feature” Work and Continuous Improvement - John Cutler
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked by developers how to persuade the business to prioritise refactoring, tooling, infrastructure and performance improvements alongside feature development. In the past my answer has been a hand-wavy suggestion to ‘show the business value’. Here’s a more thorough answer, which lies in evaluating the value and cost of delay of each item.
Some other World Wide Web hyperlinks I have enjoyed this month
- Sunsetting React Native (at Airbnb) - Gabriel Peal - Why Airbnb are ditching React Native
- Supporting React Native at Pinterest - Vivian Qu - Why Pinterest are adopting React Native
- CSS: A New Kind Of JavaScript - Heydon Pickering - I see what you did there, Heydon
- I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering - Robin Rendle - Yes, we’re still talking about this
- progression.fyi - Examples of public career progression frameworks and engineering ladders
- Accessibility for Teams - A ‘quick-start’ guide for embedding accessibility and inclusive design practices into your team’s workflow
- The “Boring Software” manifesto - Maurits van der Schee - A boring extension of the original Agile Manifesto, with added disdain for single page apps
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Tinned Fruit Missives is a monthly newsletter about web product development and front-end practices published by Jim Newbery, an independent coach and consultant from Edinburgh in Scotland.
I help growing B2B SaaS companies take their UI engineering to the next level. Find out more.
