Tinned Fruit Missives October 2017

Sorry, subscribers. There won’t be any articles about designing and optimizing your web apps for the iPhone X this month. It saddens me a bit to see the popularity of articles about dealing with a screen notch on an unreleased device - particularly when so many sites continue to do a bad job of basic accessibility and design for devices used by millions that have been around for years.

Instead, we’ve got some cracking links focusing on the long-term challenges of building high-quality web products, with a focus on infrastructure, team skills, performance and technology choice.

All the best,

– Jim

How to Run a Front-End Infrastructure Team - Jyri Tuulos

http://tech.adroll.com/blog/frontend/2017/08/29/how-to-run-a-front-end-infrastructure-team.html

It’s refreshing to see an in-depth post about what it takes to run a modern front-end web application with contributions from multiple teams. The concept of a central front-end team is becoming more prevalent, as organisations realise that ‘platform’ no longer means just server-side architecture and operations.

Is there any value in people who cannot write JavaScript? - Mandy Michael

https://medium.com/@mandy.michael/is-there-any-value-in-people-who-cannot-write-javascript-d0a66b16de06

This article stirred up some social media discussion around the value of non-JavaScript front-end skills. You didn’t ask for it, but I will add my own unequivocal opinion: if you doubt the value of CSS and HTML skills, and associated skills like accessibility, your business will eventually suffer.

A React And Preact Progressive Web App Performance Case Study: Treebo - Lakshya Ranganath & Addy Osmani

https://medium.com/dev-channel/treebo-a-react-and-preact-progressive-web-app-performance-case-study-5e4f450d5299

A very detailed dive into performance improvements for a progressive web app, representing many hours of work. For me, this article neatly demonstrates how the increased capabilities of the web platform have made performance improvements increasingly complex.

The latest from Tinned Fruit

How to prevent big front-end rewrites with lean technology choices - Jim Newbery

https://medium.com/cto-craft/how-to-prevent-big-front-end-rewrites-with-lean-technology-choices-103841b5f024

I wrote for CTO Craft on making more sustainable technology and architecture choices for your front-end by embracing lean engineering principles. I believe it’s better to focus on learning, just-in-time decisions and team empowerment rather than imposing an ‘objective’ criterion-scoring process.

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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!.

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