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?
- 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.
- Decide in the browser
- If you are never breaking anything, you're doing it wrong
- Feeling like the dumbest person in the room is awesome: learn as much as possible from other people
- RWD is hard, but so much fun
- We're all doing UX
- Don't design global solutions. They always turn out sub-optimal
- Make sure you can cache it.
- Don't think too far ahead. Because you can't.
- Focussing everyone on kpis is easier to say than do
- Adding little bits of project management here and there is simpler than a top-down methodology
- No need to overdo the testing when you have RUM
- Infrastructure as config has been a revelation
- Giving everyone control over everything rarely means anything gets broken
- Make systems that you don't mind throwing away
- When you can: design in the browser
- Monitor the shit out of everything
- UX always comes first
- Listen to your customers
- Every new feature must be justified
What is "Infrastructure as config"?