How We Gave a Redux-powered React App a Speed Boost

Jeffrey Carl Faden
Software Engineer

A client of ours has a long-lived React application using an architecture that was common at the time of its creation: Redux with thunks and sagas, with Redux Form powering the majority of forms throughout the UI, which is rich with input fields. To those familiar with this combination of technologies, you might immediately understand why they reached out to us to help fix their app’s performance issues.

Two Most Common Causes Of Technical Debt

Chris Greacen
CEO

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. 

Upgrading an Ancient React Application

Jeffrey Carl Faden
Software Engineer

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?

Server-Timings: Rails performance metrics in your dev tools

Travis Gaff
Software Engineer

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

Hotwire Decisions: When to use Turbo Frames, Turbo Streams, and Stimulus

Travis Gaff
Software Engineer

Progressive Enhancement as a guide to choosing which tool to use in Hotwire

Top 10 Requirements for a Developer Portal

Matt Wilson
CTO

When you build a developer center or developer portal, 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.

“Design system adoption is culture change disguised as a UI kit”

Annah Amici
Product Designer

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.

AI Won’t Replace Your Designer, But It May Give Them Superpowers

Ventsislav Valev
Designer

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.

The Art of the Lift and Shift

Chris Greacen
CEO

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.

Why Organize Around Value Streams?

Rik Dryfoos
Senior Consultant, Business Agility

If your team wants to pursue any of the following improvement opportunities then understanding and organizing around value streams will help.

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