Some organisations have great onboarding processes, others not so much.
Having experienced onboarding with many clients over the years, I want to share what a good onboarding process is for an engineer.
When working with clients, how teams communicate tells me more about the culture than anything else.
Successful teams should communicate like a team fielding in a game of cricket who work together towards the same goal giving each other support and encouragement.
By sharing information about the batters, pitch, conditions and strategy, a feilding team agree on a plan on how to bowl and position themselves.
A good facilitator seamlessly keeps the flow of conversations fluent and relevant, encouraging people to engage and have equal participation while remaining impartial and patient.
It's a role similar to a conductor orchestrating a choir.
Framer Motion makes creating a sequence of animations easy.
In this example, we will create a React component that animates a circle in the center of three boxes.
Should you build UI components and then add them to a page or build the page first then break it down into UI components is the chicken and egg of software development?
Read More →You've probably heard someone quote Norm Kerths' Prime Directive during a retrospective
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
In my experience, engineering teams doing their best at that time inevitably end up having to shoehorn features as requirements change or new information becomes available.
In this post, I'll discuss why great products need strong foundations.
Read More →Having worked with many clients who struggled to maintain Javascript projects, Typescript was a no brainer when choosing what to use for the project I was leading.
In this post, I'll share what and how I managed the challenges of introducing and using Typescript.
Read More →Having used Tailwind in my personal projects, I was already a convert of the utility first approach. When I was given the opportunity to lead a new project at Cambridge University Press, Tailwind was the first tool I reached for.
In this post, I'll discuss why and how using Tailwind worked out for us.
Read More →Having experienced the pain of schema-first GraphQL projects, I wanted to use a different approach for a project I led at Cambridge University Press.
In this post, I'll describe what I used and how using code-first GraphQL worked out for us.
Read More →In this post I'll show why and how you can use scoped styles with Tailwind and Svelte.
Read More →In this post I'll show why and how you can use scoped styles with Tailwind and Next.js.
Read More →Tailwind is rightly receiving all the attention it deserves. Every developer I've introduced it to falls in love with working with CSS again!
On a recent Nuxt project, I noticed a potential issue when using Tailwind class names.
Suddenly 'bg-green-500' didn't behave as expected, as an external component also using the same class had set the color to something else.
Read More →In this post I'll show why and how you can use scoped styles with Tailwind and Vue.
Read More →Stencil is a compiler for creating web components that work alone or with web applications written in React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, Ember or anything else you can think of.
Tailwind CSS deserves all praise love it's getting right now as the developer experience is incredible.
In this post I'll show how to create a Stencil web app using Tailwind CSS.
Read More →It's a good thing browsers don't allow sites to autoplay audio or videos without user interaction.
However, on iOS in particular, you might encounter the error
The request is not allowed by the user agent or the platform in the current context, possibly because the user denied permission.
when there is an async operation between the user interaction and playing of audio.
The good news is there's a workaround for it.
Read More →It can be a struggle, endlessly trying to convince your organisation to believe in your ideas and vision.
In this post, I'll share how I managed to do this.
Read More →In 2008 the media were reporting on mistakes and delays in marking examination scripts. To ensure they never made the front page of newspapers for the wrong reasons, Cambridge Assessment decided to rethink how they electronically marked examination scripts for millions of students worldwide.
Read More →In 2015 I was hired by Cambridge University Press to develop a web application providing digital access to over 35,000 books and 1.5 million journal articles, consolidating several smaller sites. The application would go onto have over 2 million users a day and generate £65 million in revenue per year.
It was a fantastic technical learning opportunity, but it was our culture and approach to product development that would teach me the most important lesson of all.
Read More →
