Tinned Fruit Missives March 2019
My recent work has focused not so much on front-end stuff, but on early-stage product development, innovation and entrepreneurship. This is great fun, but it’s been enjoyable to get my head down and read through my front-end product development reading backlog too.
January’s existential crisis seems to have (mostly) abated and we have some more positive, forward-thinking articles from February. Except of course for the group of unabashed sentimentalists who have created a simulation of Tim Berners-Lee’s original WorldWideWeb browser. Pure frivolity.
Have a great month!
– Jim
Make it Boring - Jeremy Wagner
Following on from the February edition existential crisis, here’s a wonderfully reasoned call to drop the creator’s urge to make life exciting for ourselves and focus instead on the joys of deliberate utilitarianism (or is it functionalism?).
Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories - Herb Caudill
The Spolskyean advice to avoid rewriting your software product at all costs only applies if you’re not planning on making big changes to what the product actually offers. This article demonstrates that ‘Should we rewrite or iterate?’ is probably not quite the right question.
How to Build Product-Oriented Engineering Teams - Ryan Ashcraft
A useful primer on why and how to start making the change from working as a output-driven feature factory to an outcome-focused cross-functional product team.
Some other World Wide Web hyperlinks I have enjoyed this month
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild
Bandwidth or Latency: When to Optimise for Which - Harry Roberts
The case for vanilla front-end development - Ragnar Lonn
Google Play Store now open for Progressive Web Apps 😱 - Maximiliano Firtman
Hiring experienced software engineers is hard, and it’s not going to get better: an empirical analysis - Amo Chohan
Accessibility - Back to the Future [Video] - Bruce Lawson
Porting Scratch from Flash to JavaScript: Performance, Interoperability and Extensions - Corey Frang
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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 create profitable and sustainable web products. Find out more.
