I’m sure I’m not the only one that hears about big public sector IT projects costing billions and exclaims that my firm could have delivered a better solution for a fraction of the cost. And that’s just the ones that go well. The public domain is full of stories about government IT contracts gone wrong or consulting firms paid enormous sums to deliver poor quality solutions.

Take the infamous NHS National Programme for IT project. …

So you’ve launched (or are about to launch) your new digital product. Congratulations. I’m sure that was hard work; the journey from ideation through to product launch is a demanding one.

Unfortunately, the hard work is just beginning! Now your product is in the market and users are engaging, you need to consider how you’re going to monitor its performance and how you’ll use this information to plan future improvements.

Best practice says that this process starts with clearly defining what success looks like for you and your product. This is something best done as early as possible. …

React is a Javascript library used to build user interfaces. Originally developed by Facebook, the library was open-sourced in 2013. If you’ve used the internet, you’re almost guaranteed to have encountered it; Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Whatsapp, Dropbox, Atlassian — the list of popular companies using it goes on and on.

It seems unstoppable. Many developers, particularly those who’ve been in the industry a long time, have heard this all before, though. 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…

If 2020 has proven anything, it’s that predicting the future is a mug’s game. With that said, here are my predictions for where front-end development is heading over the next 12 months 🙄

React frameworks finally mature

Frequently referred to as the ‘V’ in MVC, React has both benefited and suffered from its lack of an opinionated framework. Years on and we’ve not seen the industry coalesce on a single stack, architecture or blessed toolchain. While this flexibility has undoubtedly aided its popularity, 2021 may be the year we finally see such frameworks reach maturity.

Over the last year Vercel has continued to dominate…

Dark mode or light mode, which are you?

I’m strictly a dark mode user. Practically every app or digital platform I use, day-to-day, comes with a dark mode UI option. Even the NHS Test & Trace app has a dark mode. I can’t explain why, but it seems absolutely clear to me that dark mode is just better (sorry light moders, you’re wrong).

There are a few who continue to resist the rise of dark mode, however. Most Google products don’t have the option, for example, although that looks set to change soon.

So, where did this movement towards dark…

‘ From business idea to $100k product launch ‘

That’s the title of the blog post that inspired my co-founders and I to build an app. After spending numerous years helping Browser’s clients turn their ideas into award-winning digital products, it was time to create our own. After countless interviews with teams big and small, we landed on what felt like the perfect app idea. Now, we just needed to build it.

Unfortunately, that’s where things get a bit complicated. We’d planned to launch a lean, MVP version of the product in a month, which turned into two, which…

Every developer, when faced with a tricky problem, has experienced the same excitement and temptation: “oooh I bet I could use a library for this!” The thought is full of the promise of time saved, complexity abstracted and efficiency gained. Just think of all the problems that could be solved without writing a line of your own code!

Fast-forward on a couple of weeks and there’s probably a fifty-fifty chance you’ll find that same developer desperately trying to wrangle a square-peg library into a round hole problem, tussling with inadequate documentation or finding security holes three levels deep in node_modules.

Back in 2015, AMD’s CFO, Devinder Kumar, made the prediction that by 2019 “15% of the overall server space is in the ARM server business.”

He was wide of the mark by some way; at the start of 2019, ARM-based systems made up precisely 0% of the server market. But could Kumar have been on to something?

Well, I think so.

But first, a note of caution. It’s been fashionable to predict the demise of the x86 server monopoly for a while now, but it’s still here and, seemingly, as strong as ever. …