Think about your last few software projects. Was there a healthy balance between concrete business goals, meeting users’ needs, and shipping the product in a timely fashion? The key to striking this balance is a design process that accounts for complexity, addresses design problems early, and avoids relying too heavily on third parties. A major contributor to clunky software is flawed design processes. In this article, Eric Olive will outline four design process problems and explain how to address them.
Read more…
The distributed team structure is known to offer many benefits for a company and its employees; however, this sort of work model also comes with its own unique set of obstacles. In 2018, Owl Labs found that 56% of the participating companies in their study adopted or allowed for some form of remote arrangement for its employees. While this organizational approach has revolutionized the way we perform our job functions, it’s also paved the way for new patterns to emerge in the way we interact with each other across the distance. In this article, Randy Tolentino will review how “remote soft-skills” can help with the challenge of building authentic connections with your distributed co-workers.
Read more…
The feast or famine merry-go-round of freelancing can certainly be damaging to our bank accounts but more importantly it can deeply affect our self worth and mental health. This happens to everyone at some point or another. Even people who we assume are constantly over booked with work. Speak to people and be open and honest. It’s important to let people know you’re available for work. In this article, Liz Elcoate brings you some strategies she learnt the hard way to combat the quiet times.
Read more…
Until now, the designer-developer handoff has been fraught with inefficiencies. It’s not that software teams don’t know how to collaborate or communicate well with one another. It’s just that disparate platforms (namely, Sketch and Visual Studio Code) and incompatible workflows created tons of issues in how design was translated into code. In this article, Suzanne Scacca will show you Indigo.Design, which offers a simple solution to fix this costly and time-consuming problem for software teams.
Read more…
Apps are no small undertaking. Nor are they cheap to build and maintain. So, before you move ahead with creating a new mobile app or SaaS for your client, perhaps you should consider launching a minimum viable product (MVP) instead. With an MVP, you have a low-risk and lower cost way of testing your concept on the market. What’s not to love about that? In this article, Suzanne Scacca will show you what you need to know.
Read more…
When you are still early on in your programming career, digging into the source code of open source libraries and frameworks can be a daunting endeavor. Reading source code is difficult at first but it becomes easier with time. The goal is not to understand everything but to come away with a different perspective and new knowledge.In this article, Carl Mungazi shares how he got over his fear and began using source code to improve his knowledge and skills. He also uses Redux to demonstrate how he approaches breaking down a library.
Read more…
When customers interact with your brand, they’re not aware of what’s going on backstage, and there is no reason they should. All they perceive is the play you’re presenting, the story you’re sharing, and the solution it represents for them. There is only one brand experience. At the end of the day, customers are not tasting individual ingredientz, they’re eating the entire meal. At once. In sit-downs that keep getting shorter. When the individual actors go off script, as great as they might sound solo, the brand experience breaks.
Read more…
Figma has become a very popular tool for web and product designers, mainly because of its focus on design teams and team libraries. In this article, Emiliano Cicero aims to help you avoid mistakes and assist you with the building of your own Figma component library. He’ll also cover in detail the components’ organization and will give you a possible solution if you have a large number of icons in the library.
Read more…
Take a moment to remember the last time you collaborated in a code review. Did your team overcome feedback resistance and manage time expectations? Fostering a healthy mindset is the key to build trust and sharing knowledge with your colleagues. In this article, Sandrina Pereira will share how this outcome can be changed by changing your mindset during a code review as a team, as an author and as a reviewer.
Read more…
Are you using many full-sized images on your WordPress site? Take note that this is causing your pages to load slowly. A slow website affects your SEO, increases the bounce rates, and keeps your audience at a distance. There are many ways to speed up your WordPress site, each one complementing the other. In this article, Adelina Țucă will help you learn how to easily optimize all the images on your site (manually or on autopilot) in order to gain better loading times.
Read more…
