phamann

Lesson's learnt building the Guardian

Below is a collection of my favourite responses I gathered from Guardian engineers when asked the question: What have you learnt starting from scratch and building a mobile-first next generation web platform for the Guardian?

Daithi O Crualaoich

• Work with great people.
• Deploy like crazy. This means the team has to control the infrastructure as well as code.
• Design is not a service. Designers have to sit in the team.
• Infrastructure is intrinsically unreliable. Discard and replace is the robust strategy.
• Use your CDN for HTML too.
• Don't always do as you are told.

andyhd

function maybe(value) {
  var obj = null;
  function isEmpty() { return value === undefined || value === null }
  function nonEmpty() { return !isEmpty() }
  obj = {
    map: function (f) { return isEmpty() ? obj : maybe(f(value)) },
    getOrElse: function (n) { return isEmpty() ? n : value },
    isEmpty: isEmpty,
    nonEmpty: nonEmpty
  }