Oct. 16, 2022, noon

PinkLetter - When will this be done?

PinkLetter (odone.io)

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Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills in web development.

My Ramblings This Week

If you are like me, the following question is something that can literally keep you up at night:

When will this be done?

The problem is that most people think of estimations as a promise for a fixed scope and fixed time.

But you can only pick one if you want to have a chance of success: either fixed scope and flexible time or flexible scope and fixed time.

The former is what we end up doing all the time. Except, we discover that the time was flexible when the feature is late and people are already shouting at each other.

But it’s the latter we should prefer. Fixed time means predictability, flexible scope means focusing on reaching an outcome instead of being stubborn about a plan that was conceived when people knew the least about what they were building.

Elsewhere on the Web

Idea Generation by Sam Altman

if you want to be a founder and can’t get an idea for a company, you should probably work on getting good at idea generation first

Riccardo: Replace founder with programmer and company with correct and efficient code solution.


Suspense and Error Boundaries in React 18 by Sam Selikoff

Learn how Suspense allows you to use Error Boundaries for network requests by turning asynchronous exceptions into render-time errors.

Riccardo: The dynamicity of it is really cool. But it’s also a shiny foot gun.


Thinking in Hotwire: Progressive Enhancement by Matt Swanson

There are many tutorials about how to get started with Hotwire and how to use the individual pieces. But one thing that took me a while to grasp was how to “think in Hotwire”.

Riccardo: Is progressive enhancement applied to HTML-over-the-wire frameworks going to fail as the original progressive enhancement?

You just read issue #119 of PinkLetter (odone.io). You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.

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