Monday, 23rd April 2018
Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. [...] As a result you switch tools a lot, and your ability to migrate to new software can easily become the defining constraint for your overall velocity. [...] Migrations matter because they are usually the only available avenue to make meaningful progress on technical debt.
Why it took a long time to build that tiny link preview on Wikipedia (via) Wikipedia now shows a little preview card on internal links with an image and summary paragraph of the linked page. As a Wikpedia user I absolutely love this feature—and as an engineer and product designer, it’s fascinating to hear the challenges they overcame to ship it. Of particular interest: actually generating a useful summary of a page, while stripping out the cruft that often accumulates at the beginning of their text. It’s also an impressive scaling challenge: the API they use for this feature is now handling more than 500,000 requests per minute.
react-jsonschema-form. Exciting library from the Mozilla Services team: given a JSON Schema definition, react-jsonschema-form can produce a cleanly designed React-powered form for adding and editing data that matches that schema. Includes support for adding multiple items in a nested array, re-ordering them, custom form widgets and more.