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Why user stories belong in the garbage

This article isn’t arguing against writing user stories, it’s arguing against keeping user stories:

If you put the story in your icebox/backlog/cooler/hat, it’s time for it to go. It’s now duplicate documentation. That story was only there because you were yet to break it down into tasks. Now you have, so you delete it.

I don’t mean tick it off as complete, I mean right-click on it and hit the ‘delete’ button.

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React is king (and that’s not changing anytime soon)

Connor Ward:

Before React, there was Angular and before that, there was jQuery – all frameworks that have fallen by the wayside. It’s just a matter of time before something comes along and takes the mantle as the new hotness. Or so they say.

I’m not so sure. In fact, I think React will be with us for many years to come.

He sites React Native’s success as one reason React will remain relevant, amongst others. I’m not so sure.

I believe React The Idea (uni-directional data flow through declarative component trees) is here to stay, but I’m not so convinced that React The Software won’t be soon replaced like its predecessors were.

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Frontend predictions for 2021

Predictions are always fun, especially when we can look back and see how wrong we were. Here’s Browser London’s Jay Freestone laying out where he thinks the frontend is going in 2021:

  1. React frameworks finally mature
  2. We get a glimpse at container queries
  3. WASM explodes
  4. The monolith makes a come back

There’s the predictions. Click through for the Jay’s reasoning.

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Apple’s move to ARM could reshape the development landscape

James Blizzard, writing for Browser London:

in my view, a number of factors are converging to make change ever more likely. Namely, the huge scale of cloud computing providers, Apple’s plans to migrate their laptop products to ARM-based processors, and the opening up of the educational space to include ARM-based systems.

There are some great thoughts from James in this article. From my vantage point, ARM is well-positioned for the short/medium-term, but RISC-V might just disrupt that for the long-term. One small piece of evidence: how Apple positioned this transition to Apple Silicon instead of to ARM.

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The power of the MoSCoW method

I’ve never heard of this method before, but it’s definitely interesting enough to link up for you:

At its core, the MoSCoW method is simply a prioritization framework that can be applied to any kind of situation or project, but it works best when a large number of tasks need to be ruthlessly whittled down into a prioritised and achievable to-do list.

The general idea is you take a list of tasks/stories/whatevs and place each into one of for buckets: Must, Should, Could, and Won’t. (Somehow this gets shortened to MoSCoW for the namesake.)

If you listened to our recent episode on Agile, you know I’m not a fan of ceremony when it comes to planning practices, but I do think there is some value here if you do it right. Click through for the skinny on how to run a MoSCoW exercise as well as some pitfalls to avoid.

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Should we still be selling responsive web design?

The term ‘responsive web design’ has been a mainstay in the world of digital development for many years. Go to any early-stage client meeting and you’ll almost always get asked to ‘make sure it works on mobile’.

The standard response to this has generally been, ‘don’t worry, we’ll build it responsive’, but is this response out of date?

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