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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.

Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent

  • 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

Stephan Fowler

  • 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.

Matt Chadburn

  • 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

Patrick Hamann

  • 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
@rburch
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rburch commented Sep 9, 2013

Yeah, I don't know what that is either?

@rburch
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rburch commented Sep 9, 2013

Oh I found it. Real User Monitoring

@suture
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suture commented Sep 29, 2013

I think it's a drink.

@tomByrer
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@rburch or Real User Metrics, almost the same, alludes to include analysis.

@racine99
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I am assuming this is the beta version of the Guardian, right: http://www.theguardian.com/us?view=mobile

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