Tinned Fruit Missives September 2017
Hi!
Here’s your regular monthly collection of vaguely related links about the business and practice of front-end product development. Enjoy!
– Jim
Struggling to Find Great Senior JavaScript Developers? Mentorship is the Answer - Eric Elliott
https://medium.com/javascript-scene/struggling-to-find-great-senior-javascript-developers-mentorship-is-the-answer-d352ea3574eb
Mentorship is an investment in your team’s capabilities that compounds over time. Eric highlights the chronic under-investment in training and skills development in software development teams and extols the benefits of mentorship. If you have a team of mostly junior developers, this one is for you. I wish I had learned the benefits of having a mentor earlier in my career.
The How, What and Why of Migrating to ReactJS - Jack Franklin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVna1-9yMuA
Managing a significant front-end application migration is no small undertaking, and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But if you are about to embark on a project like this (as I am currently), do yourself a favour and watch this talk. Jack describes how his team at Songkick are managing their migration from Angular 1.x to React, focusing more on process and team aspects than the code itself.
The Languages Which Almost Became CSS - Zack Bloom
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-languages-which-almost-became-css/
I’m a sucker for posts about early web technology, and this one about precursors to CSS is a delight. In a parallel universe, us web developers are all griping about all the parentheses in DSSSL or writing tortuous PSL96 expressions. I still have nightmares about SGML being in wide usage.
Some other World Wide Web hyperlinks I have enjoyed this month
- Coder Frozen in 2009 Awakens to Find Frontend Development not Awful - Richard Schneeman - I often have pub conversations along these lines with non-front-end developers
- Inside a super fast CSS engine: Quantum CSS (aka Stylo) - Lin Clark - A long, illustrated deep-dive into how Mozilla’s new Rust-based rendering engine works
- Software development 450 words per minute - Tuukka Ojala - Astonishing insight into how a blind programmer goes about his work
- Improving the metaphor of technical debt - Alex Hudson - Anything based on Dickens has my approval. I named my dog after a Dickens character after all.
- Small Fuctions Considered Harmful - Cindy Sridharan - Ignore the title-bait, this is a balanced discussion of function size as an indicator of code complexity.
- Resource Constraints - Fred Wilson - Why ‘we don’t have the resources’ is a cop-out.
- The average web page is 3MB. How much should we care? - Tammy Everts
- Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer - Dan Heller
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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 consultant from Edinburgh in Scotland.
I help growing web product companies with their front-end development strategy and implementation. Let’s talk!.
