Article Roundup - March 15, 2019

Principles of Modern Application Development
This is a large article, but it is tackling a large topic: modern application development. They break things down into three main principals: keep it small, design for the developer, and make it networked. The principals lend themselves well to a microservices architecture, but they aren’t necessarily advocating for that. You can just as easily accomplish much of what they are looking for by building components or libraries. It’s a long read, but it’s a good read.

The Great Divide
Labels are very helpful, but only if they are consistent. Job titles are just a kind of label, and the label “frontend developer” is not especially useful right now. One one side you have your frontend developers that are focused on JavaScript as their primary skillset; on the other the frontend developers that focus on CSS, HTML, design, and accessibility. There are people who cross that line, but most can’t do all of it equally well. That’s what this article dives into the divide that exists on the frontend.

Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories
The “don’t rewrite your application from the ground up” advice has been around for a while now, but is that really the best advice? Should you really never rewrite your software? That’s what the author of this article wonders, and presents several case studies on how things went in different situations.