What We’re Reading — February 3, 2016
A curated selection of interesting links shared, and discussed, in our #what-we_re-reading Slack channel. Have something we should talk about? Share it with us in the comments.
We use ES2015 in pretty much all of our products, but didn’t realize that transpilation* was artificially inflating our file sizes, even after a pre-production code minification build step. We’re likely going to adapt our toolchain for future products to reduce package size, and have our own blog post in the works about the relative file size cost of each ES2015 feature.
*- What we’re learning during the writing of this blog post: “transpilation” is considered a word by the French version of Wiktionary, but not the English version.
Social Tables is a deliberately developmental organization, and we place a high value on creating opportunities for our team members to build both interpersonal skills as well as the faculties required by their job description. For instance, we try to provide leadership opportunities for our engineering team colleagues at every level of development experience — from the rotating initiative “technical leads,” to specific organizational roles, and a formalized direct report structure. This requires us to treat “leadership” as an actionable and measurable concept, and this piece inspired conversation on how we can start to operationalize it.
Two important takeaways from this.
- Internet users in China: 668 million.
Internet users in the United States: 266 million.
2. At Social Tables, our product and design teams strive to make software that’s simple and intuitive to use; the fact that what’s “intuitive” is quite subjective is important to consider when building interfaces. Our products are used globally, so a deeper understanding of the diverse cultural and technological experiences of our users helps us to be able to delight everyone.
