What I Learned About the Web in 2011

by December 16, 2011

I recently had the pleasure of contributing What I Learned About the Web in 2011 to A List Apart's year-end retrospective. Here's what stuck with me the most from a year filled with lots of learning:

In 2011, I became addicted to speed. No, not that kind of speed. Speed of web development iteration and release. Most of my year was spent in a startup we engineered to be fast from day one. During that time, I learned the value of creating a Command Line Interface (CLI) for everything we did. I became a convert to logic-less templates that fully separate back-end and front-end logic. And I spent hours a day staring at real-time views of what people were doing on our site and iterating quickly based on what I saw. All in the interest of speed.

Why? A web application is a “living” thing and all living things are continually changing from cradle to grave. The faster they can respond, the better they can adapt to change. Changes in technology, in people’s behaviors, and in business. Setting yourself up to be fast up front allows you to move with the web instead of being left behind it and that’s pretty important to me.

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