Gone are the days where we built websites & apps by manually copy/pasting colors and sizes from a design file, then again from one part of our codebase to another, making small adjustments to make it fit a little better in this one specific instance. Need a slightly larger margin because of an adjacent border? Adjust it to a new pixel value and you’re good to go! A color should be slightly darker here? Edit the color’s hex code down a little!
The result was magic numbers everywhere in CSS, with no indication of the logic behind the adjustments we made in specific instances. And you can forget about a consistent color palette.
While it’s rare that building a thing in the most correct way also gives the fastest result, at bitcrowd we’ve achieved exactly this by building our clients’ component libraries on a solid design system. As a bonus, even backend developers get totally on board with what used to be seen as a niche design or frontend wish.
Congratulations, your product has survived long enough to need a redesign! This is something to be proud of, as is the fact that you’re also about to invest more in its future. But a redesign is a daunting task, with the successful launch day laying far over the horizon.
Bitcrowd has successfully lead many redesign projects, both for long-term clients whose products we’ve been building ourselves for years, and for new clients who find they don’t have the expertise or capacity to complete the task in-house. This post is an outline of how we work to bring as much certainty and security as possible to the process.
For a software consulting firm like bitcrowd, it is crucial to estimate the effort of the work ahead. In this blogpost we will explore our best practices regarding requirements engineering & estimations.
The dev team receives the envelope with the application specs from a dead letter box in the park at night. Two months later, they deliver the code. Their client deploys their app, and everything works as expected. So what was in that envelope?
How to configure your Docker & Kubernetes deployment to send deploy markers to AppSignal
Bluesky's source code is widely open source, so you can run your own social
network with it. - Provided you stay with a comparably small user base. What's
missing? A performant DataPlane implementation. Closing this gap would be an
important step towards building digital independence.
The details of our Proof-of-Concept dataplane in Elixir
How weʼre extending Discourse with two plugins and a custom theme to build Wiblio, an open source social platform for the communities meeting at Berlinʼs public libraries.
We moved the test suite of a large legacy Rails app from Selenium to Cuprite and celebrate its reliability since then.
