People say "technical debt" like it's a bad thing. But those who are serious about software development know that this game is all about managing technical debt. Technical debt is a natural part of the landscape in any software development team’s world. It's neither good, nor bad. Yet when trade-offs are mismanaged, technical debt is likely to cause your productivity to grind to a halt. For people who hit that point and wonder why - there should be no mystery about what causes technical debt, the answer is right in front of you.
While the world of office work has changed for us and many others since we first released Lunch in 2016, the app itself has been happily chugging along, attracting regular users and helping teams with one of the most pressing questions of the day: where’s lunch?
If you use the browser development tools, you've likely seen the request timing information on the Network tab. It shows how long it takes for web pages and their components to load. But did you know that servers can also send their own timing information? They can do this with a header named Server-Timing. Modern browsers can show the server timing data next to the client timing data on the Network tab. This can help developers find and fix server-side performance issues such as N+1 queries. You can read more about the Server-Timing header's specification in the W3 working draft, or on Mozilla’s documentation site
When you build a developer center, you’ve got tough customers. They’re developers, after all. They either know precisely what they want, in which case they will demand that you deliver exactly what you advertise. Or they don’t know what they want at all, in which case you have to educate them in the most painless way possible, and make onboarding easy and fun.
So stated Lauren LoPrete at Figma’s short and sweet Schema conference last Wednesday. With a grab-bag of the most interesting talks from New York, London, and Tokyo over the past few weeks, speakers shared their experience with design systems from the perspective of individual contributors all the way up to senior leadership, wrapping up with a live speaker Q&A at the end.
You may have heard: don’t send your kids to art school, because the AIs have taken over the creative professions. No sooner had MidJourney and DALL-E made the news, than we started to hear about Google and Facebook’s entrants in not only image generation, but full-motion video and audio. The news is coming faster than career counselors can keep up.
A Lift and Shift (according to Techopedia) is “a particular technique in software migration where an application or code base is taken out of one environment and placed in another environment, without significant underlying design change.” It often happens when a big company buys a little company, and wants to rehost or replatform the little company’s application. Or it happens in any company when they want to change platforms or move an application to the cloud.
Just a few weeks after Smashingconf, I attended Queer Design Club’s first annual summit. Since its founding in 2019, the organization has fostered a growing Slack community, aiming to broaden the conversation around diversity beyond the limited silos of race and gender. With the summit, they brought that community (virtually) together while elevating traditionally underrepresented voices from the design industry. With an eye to last year’s Queer Design Count, speakers looked at both the statistics and their own personal experiences to discuss how we can all help move the design industry forward.