Health to the Web

Challenge : you need to match a css id that has a stable beginning and end but a middle that could change and you don't have control over it. You could look at using ends with $ attribute selector or starts with ^ attribute selector. Not bad but not necessarily a strong match esp if ending is generic, like '-container' The wildcard is not a good match (pardon the pun) because of how it works, any match in a string versus wildcarding one or more characters in middle Solution : combine attribute selectors When combined like so they function as an AND. Perfect! Combine the starts with and ends with as in "starts with x AND ends with y" e.g. [id^='third-party-'][id$='-container'] this will target classes like so:  ' third-party-*-container' love it Good css tricks article

Performance of web apps is a big topic and has a direct impact on users engagement. Users will simply not wait for, nor use, slow apps (over 50% of users abandon a website which takes more than 3 seconds to load).  Performance is part of the User Experience. What users experience and what it costs to use. As well as direct user experience, large apps also impact users plan bandwidth costs and cpu performance of their device. Performance (aka speed) is not just the time it takes to load an app. It includes loading feedback, time to show useful content when a user can interact with the page and the ongoing experience of using the app. Google in  web.dev identify phases which they call  "core web vitals" which are "loading"                  "interactivity"          "visual stability"   Metrics such as First Paint, First Meaningful Paint and Time to interactive can be used to measure these  ...

 This is simply a great read , pure gold from Ron Jeffries "To me, the important thing in Real Agile is to pick the next few things to do, and do them promptly. The key question is to find the most valuable things to do, and to do them quickly. Doing them quickly comes down to doing small slices of high value, and iterating rapidly" "This makes me think that estimation, be it in points or time, is to be avoided." "we’d work to have a list of the few most important next things to do." I feel we often try to do too much for completeness sakes or other reasons, when we should be ruthless about going after where the value is. Now how do you decide what is valuable? How do you, like a sculptor working on a slab of rock, whittle it down to fine grained pieces? Ron has advice for that too which he calls story slicing: split a larger story into smaller stories  work on the slices that deliver value drop any that don't any value "Every set of requirements ...

Does your organization use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)?  How do OKRs work in an Agile development process? Lets think and blog about this. Objectives and Key Results recap:  an Objective is "a clearly defined goal and 3-5 key results - specific measures used to track the achievement of that goal" - wikipedia A key result must be measurable e.g. %, $, number and easy to answer if it was achieved or not. Objective vs goal? basically the same but Objective has added specificity. But its what you want to achieve Originated at Intel, popularized at Google and now lots of other companies including where I work for years. Objectives are often defined by senior company & product leadership and then cascade down to be decomposed by departments and groups and ultimately teams/squads. Often the Objective is for multiple quarters. A key part of the Agile process is frequent delivery of software (often every day or week), learning from releases and being flexible (agile) to new ...

  We've used cypress for a couple of years now to write e2e tests for our apps. Recently I have the opportunity to setup an cypress test suite using cypress-cucumber node package which supports gherkin syntax (new for me). These are my notes and learnings. cypress.io created in 2014, written in javascript, first beta 2017 lots of cool features, can view state on each line of cypress tests, api info logged to console wait on apis (no more sleeps or set wait times and flakey timing problems) now up to version 6.5, e.g. route replaced by intercept uses testing tech you're used to describe and it from Mocha and expect from Chai ( see more here ) cypress docs, guides, tutorials, recipes are awesome cypress-cucumber write cypress tests using gherkin syntax (feature, scenario, given when then etc.) which is based on BDD (see below) npm package a way to write, organize and reuse cypress tests BDD  a way for business and technical people to work together to reach a shared understandin...

Opentable held our 4th annual hackathon this week for 3 days Oct 13-15.  Over 80 ideas were submitted and 34 ideas were actively worked on for the hackathon. Participants spanned all the Opentable offices including: San Francisco, New York, Mumbai, London,  Melbourne and where-ever we all are these days. I've been involved in every Opentable hackathon since 2017 when I was on the #1 overall winning team "Invite Friends" (woot!), to 2019 when I helped organize that years hackathon to 2020 when I returned to being a participant on the "Personal Collections" hack. The "Personal Collections" hack is to a hack add slick support in Opentable.com for users to create, maintain and share lists of their favorite restaurants for various occasions as well as find and follow others lists. We had a team of 6 people across London and San Francisco offices, 2 designers and 4 engineers. I believe you should use the hackathon as an opportunity to do something different....

One of the 4 key callouts of the  agile manifesto  is: "Working software over comprehensive documentation". The first of the  12 principals of agile  is:  " Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer  through early and continuous delivery  of valuable software"  The third of the 12 principals is:  " Deliver working software frequently, from a  couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a  preference to the shorter timescale." The seventh of the 12 principals is:  " Working software is the primary measure of progress" We noticing a theme yet? Clearly delivering working software  early and often  is a very important Agile development practice. Notice the guidance provided regarding duration: "from a couple of weeks....with a preference to the shorter.." Early and often software delivery is one of the most important aspects of being Agile.  As engineers and leads we have a responsibility to ensure th...