The power of technical decisions
summary
Eighteen months to build an in‑house publishing platform colocated on the newsroom floor with a 20–25 person cross‑functional team, authoring stays in Newsgate while the site runs on Node and React as a bespoke CMS; mobile starts in Swift then migrates to React Native to hit Android and increase team collaboration; styling moves from Sass to CSS‑in‑JS (glamorous) with visual regression tests; ad‑tech breaks on an SPA, continuous deployment and Kanban replace Scrum, and a last‑minute swap from Elasticsearch to Postgres three weeks before launch stabilises data.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Start
- 0:09The power (and consequences) of technical decisions
- 16:49Ad tech/analytics doesn't work well with single page applications
- 20:33Having JavaScript (TypeScript) everywhere has allowed more team collaboration
- 31:28Learnings
- 32:23Front-end development is hard, a design system is like an architecture plan for your UI / UX
- 33:54Visual regression testing is awesome, invest in good testing tools
- 36:03Document your decisions, it saves repeated conversations
- 37:56React Native
- 39:06Multiple platform release and code sharing works!
- 39:53Just because there is a common language to work in, doesn't mean everyone should...
- 40:58Throwing a team at a deadline is always a bad idea
- 48:24CSS being treated as a concept, not a language
- 56:06When things are busy, finishing tasks becomes hard
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