Reading (never enough)

Aleks is an author of a great PostCSS Sorting plugin that we use at Wildbit to keep SCSS files consistent across projects. In this guest post at CSS-Tricks he talks about PostCSS plugins for inlining images, calculating their dimensions, busting cache, modifying SVGs, and creating sprites. Totally worth bookmarking.

Rian is a product manager on Postmark and a first employee in this role at Wildbit. Coming from a UX background he has a very pragmatic view on prototyping:

I think one of the biggest reasons for delays and conflict in software development is a lack of shared understanding. If a designer and a product manager and a developer have a different idea of what a product or feature needs to do, that’s a big problem — and one that’s often discovered way too late in the process. We’ve been taught in the Lean movement that “deliverables are bad”, and yes, some of them are, but by getting rid of all deliverables so many details can get lost.

The interview also touches on Rian's book, UX and product strategies, and challenges that product managers face when working in a software context.

An interesting look on a front-end development process when a main directive is to ship zero bugs.

Over 3.5 years I ended up shipping two small prose based errors to production. One was caught before we mailed it, one was not. Instead of saying “Track your progress” the text said “Rack your progress.” Not perfect, but definitely better than my record on the web.
It wasn’t an accident I was able to do this. I'm not nor have I ever been a super genius that writes mistake-free code. I benefited from working with engineers that treated this problem of bug free development as their number one priority. They treated my development workflow as a first-class citizen. I was able to sit in meetings and explain problems I had - and people tried to build tools to help me solve them.