Tinned Fruit Missives May 2019
The Hertz website redesign lawsuit story that emerged recently is yet another cautionary tale about big outsourced IT projects. Much of the row between the Hertz and Accenture is over the scope of ‘responsive design’ and ‘reusable brand components’. That getting this wrong can potentially result in a $32m suit is… eye-watering. We usually talk about good work and ‘craft’ on the web as a moral responsibility and source of personal satisfaction. But it’s worth remembering that there’s a concrete financial angle to it too.
Have a great month!
– Jim
The Doomed Rewrite - Dion Almaer
Been there, done that. Rewriting the very thing that has made the business you work for a success is a risky undertaking, to say the least. Dion points mostly at risks to performance here, and therefore setting and managing a performance budget as the solution. I think there’s a lot more to it than that though (warning, self-promotional link!)
Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for ‘defective’ cyber-revamp - Kieren McCarthy
Yikes. Painful reading for any web worker who cares even the slightest amount about creating a high quality user experience. There’s so much more work to be done to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.
TDD Changed My Life - Eric Elliott
I agree with almost everything Eric says about Test Driven Development (TDD) here. “TDD eradicates fear of change,” he argues. This is a collaborative, team-wide change in culture, not an individual effect. And until you’ve experienced that removal of fear it’s hard to understand how freeing it is for product development teams.
Some other World Wide Web hyperlinks I have enjoyed this month
You probably don’t need that hip web framework - Owen Williams
Responsible JavaScript: Part I - Jeremy Wagner
Why Don’t We Just Use Material Design? - Ben Moss
Hire More Designers, OK? (Video) - John Cutler
Pros and Cons of Moving to Product from Engineering - Tommi Forsström
How We Used WebAssembly To Speed Up Our Web App By 20X - Robert Aboukhalil
Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective - Facundo Corradini
Flow and Value Creation (in Product Development) (Video) - John Cutler
Accessibility in Agile Transformational Practices - Dylan Barrell
WWW: Where’s the Writable Web? - Remy Sharp
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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.
