“Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil”
Don’t wait to implement pagination. You’re going to need to paginate.
On the relativity of great product development strategies
This here piece is a good overview of what are current best practices in product development.
“What is a Great Product Development Strategy?”
It contains this here expectation-setter:
“Usually, the R&D department tends to make multiple versions of the product. Officially, it’s called prototyping, and it can take months to figure out.”
And that’s just the prototyping stage. Each of the other stages potentially takes even a good team weeks if not months to complete.
The downsides of this strategy is how much investment it requires, both in terms of time and resources. For it to work properly, most of the steps require decent-sized teams and, potentially, months without any real revenue. In effect, it’s tailor made for either VC-funded startups in a tech hub city or pre-existing large companies with plenty of resources. It works well for them because it leverages resources they have relatively easy access to.
Product development is always going to be resource-intensive. It doesn’t take a deep reading of About Face to realise that doing this well takes a lot of money and people-hours.
But if you aren’t VC-funded, aren’t based in a tech hub, or don’t have the resources then this strategy is likely to be a struggle, even more of a struggle than product development normally is.
As far as I have been able to tell over the years, the best chance a small, resource-strapped team (or solo entrepreneur) has of making a successful product is by starting off with a small product, make that work, and iterate from there as regularly described by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman at Stacking the Bricks. Much like blindly copying Facebook’s software development strategies with only three developers versus their 25K developers is only likely to cause you pain, copying their product development strategies when you have three people and a slim budget is also likely to be fraught.
After all, none of these companies—Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix—were using their current processes or strategies when they were starting out in the proverbial garage.
If you’re planning on copying them, why not focus on the strategies they were using when they were at a stage similar to where you are instead of where you hope to be ten years from now?
“The One Where I Don’t Want To Talk About Substack Just As Much As You Do, And Yet”
“This is funny, you see, because now we are anticipating the movement of certain kinds of people with certain kinds of views to a certain platform.”
So, what do you do when somebody writing about product development or management refers to Google or Netflix as companies that make great products whose processes and methods you should emulate?
‘Cause ‘great’ is not the word I’d use to describe their output.
“Use transparent borders and outlines to assist with high contrast mode - Quick Tip - Piccalilli”
Learned something new
“Vendor by default - macwright.com”
I’ve done this occasionally in a project. It works better than you’d think, provided you pay attention to the caveats and conditions described in this post.
“Defending Personas. If you love a design tool, set it free - by Alan Cooper - Mar, 2021 - Medium”
Alan Cooper writes about what it’s like to have something you created constantly misrepresented.
“Disabled buttons don’t have to suck - by Justine Win - Mar, 2021 - Justine Win Stories”
System fonts don’t have to be ugly, but web fonts aren’t as bad as you think either
“System fonts don’t have to be ugly /// Iain Bean”
I like this overview of system fonts you can use. Many of these are extremely capable and attractive fonts whose aesthetics and functionality are first rate.
But I also agree with this short statement that comes towards the end of the post:
Byte-for-byte, JavaScript is more expensive for the browser to process than the equivalently sized web font. When prioritising what to spend your performance budget on, remember that web fonts contribute to the beauty of your site. Tracking JavaScript does not.
For some reason the distinction between types of payloads is sometimes getting lost in the discussion. You see developers talk about using system fonts, use “blur hashes” and lazy-loading images, or even dropping images altogether all the while they are ratcheting up the JS payload.
Image decoding is multithreaded and often hardware accelerated.
Web fonts are rendered using tightly optimised code and are extremely cacheable, provided you use the correct HTTP and CSS settings.
And even CSS code that’s “slow” is still an order of magnitude faster than most website’s fast JS.
We need a sense of proportion in the bandwidth and performance debate and JS is proportionally much, much worse for performance than any other part of the web dev stack.
“Should I use functional or object-oriented programming? – Chelsea Troy”
Know the pros and cons to each approach and use them appropriately.
“UI Design Testing Tools I Use All The Time — Smashing Magazine”
“Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny - Blood Knife”
There has been a noticable rise in American puritanism over the last couple of decades.
“Chrome’s IndexedDB— from best in class to the slowest - by David Fahlander - Mar, 2021 - Medium”
“On the myth of short life expectancy, and COVID complacency – Going Medieval”
“Daring Fireball: Google’s Search Results Have Gotten Worse”
Substantially worse in many cases.