Tinned Fruit Missives May 2018
I’ve managed to choose a curiously web-free set of primary links this month. It’s easy to focus on web stuff at the exclusion of other things, but there’s much to be learned from elsewhere, of course. Not least because us front-end developers are often teased for discovering and re-invigorating long-dead software design patterns from the 1980s. And we don’t like to be teased.
Have an enjoyable and productive month!
– Jim
Delivering on Something That Doesn’t Exist - Tim Cull
If you’ve ever worked in a sales-driven B2B SaaS or product company, this article may feel all too familiar. Tim Cull questions pervasive incentive culture that permits sales staff to be rewarded for closing deals based on software features that don’t yet exist. It’s not as ranty as you might expect, though. He presents a fair-minded assessment of where this problem comes from and how you can alleviate it before it causes real damage.
Software Testing Anti-patterns - Kostis Kapelonis
Opinionated list of common testing anti-patterns. I don’t 100% agree with all of these, but there is some well-earned pragmatic advice here. I particularly like the horses-for-courses test pyramids that depend on the type of product that you’re testing.
A Taxonomy of Tech Debt - Bill Clark
Tech debt is fun! Or at least, reading about other people’s tech debt is fun. Here, Bill Clark looks at how you can categorise and prioritise tech debt along three metrics, and uses examples from Riot Games’ League of Legends to illustrate. I’m intrigued by the concept of contagion as a measure of how much worse the problem is likely to get.
Some other World Wide Web hyperlinks I have enjoyed this month
- Best Practices With CSS Grid Layout - Rachel Andrew
- Announcing the Second Edition of “Refactoring” - Martin Fowler - Classic 20-year-old book to get an update and moves from Java to JavaScript-based examples
- Progressive Web Apps on iOS are here - Maximiliano Firtman - kinda, not really
- Spinning jenny - Ethan Marcotte
- The Evolution of Tools - Closing the loop with Design Intelligence - Jon Gold
- Designing very large (JavaScript) applications - Malte Ubl
- selfcare.tech - Don’t forget to take care of yourself, people!
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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 front-end developers become leaders. Find out more.
