Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills about web development.
My Ramblings This Week
It’s 18:30 and I’ve been working since 10:00 on something that I estimated would take two hours.
Yeah, I suck at estimations. But don’t tell me you’ve never committed the same crime!
The plan was to help a friend set up her development environment. Unfortunately, one of the codebases she needs to work with is an old internal project.
You know, entropy is a thing in software: you leave aside some code for a few months and it magically becomes legacy. With internal projects, it’s even worse.
That’s why each project should have a maintainer—including internal ones. Software needs someone keeping their eyes on the issues, pull requests, and the overall fitness of the code.
And being the guardian of an internal project is an excellent opportunity: it’s low risk and exposes you to problems you better know how to solve in your commercial endeavours.
Elsewhere on the Web
Tao of React - Software Design, Architecture & Best Practices by Alex Kondov
While there are best practices on the micro level, most teams build their own “thing” when it comes to architecture.
Prince of Persia reimplementation written in HTML5 / JavaScript (MS-DOS version).
(Riccardo: If you are old enough, this could make your eyes shiny.)
Overengineering can kill your product by Simón Muñoz
The graveyard is filled with exquisitely designed startups and products to scale to millions of users who never got the slightest bit of traction. Don’t become one of them.