Practice
Handover is the project
A build that only its authors can run has not been delivered. It has been lent.
2 min read
Blog
Notes from real projects: what we tried, what broke, and what we would do differently. No listicles.
Engineering
The database is the last thing you can change cheaply
Screens get redesigned every year. The shape of the data outlives all of it, and every shortcut taken there is paid for later, with interest.
2 min read
Design
Motion that tells you something, and motion that just moves
Animation is not decoration you add at the end. It is either explaining a change of state or it is standing between someone and their task.
2 min read
Commerce
The shipping cost you cannot promise
Checkout has to show a number before anyone has weighed anything. Every shop solves this, and the ones that solve it badly find out at the counter.
2 min read
Growth
What analytics cannot tell you
It counts what happened. It has nothing to say about what someone was trying to do, which is the only thing worth knowing.
2 min read
Engineering
Every integration fails; the question is what happens next
Payment gateways, couriers, mail services and accounting systems all go down. Designing as though they do not is the actual bug.
2 min read
Design
Dark mode is not an inverted stylesheet
Flip the colours and half the interface stops meaning what it meant. The work is in the exceptions, and there are more of them than you expect.
2 min read
Commerce
Discounts are a data model, not a button
A promotion looks like one field until the second promotion exists. Then it is an ordering problem, a rounding problem and an accounting problem.
2 min read
Growth
The page that loads fast for you
On the machine it was built on, over office fibre, with everything cached. Every one of those conditions is untrue for the person you built it for.
2 min read
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