Robin Layfield UltraSimplified

Contract Killer 3

Revised date: 07/11/2012

Between us [company name] and you [customer name]

Summary:

We’ll always do our best to fulfil your needs and meet your expectations, but it’s important to have things written down so that we both know what’s what, who should do what and when, and what will happen if something goes wrong. In this contract you won’t find any complicated legal terms or long passages of unreadable text. We’ve no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. What we do want is what’s best for both parties, now and in the future.

Lesson's learnt building the Guardian

Below is a collection of my favourite responses I gathered from Guardian engineers when asked the question: What have you learnt starting from scratch and building a mobile-first next generation web platform for the Guardian?

Daithi O Crualaoich

Work with great people.
Deploy like crazy. This means the team has to control the infrastructure as well as code.
Design is not a service. Designers have to sit in the team.
Infrastructure is intrinsically unreliable. Discard and replace is the robust strategy.
Use your CDN for HTML too.
Don't always do as you are told.

	/**
	* Kvick and Dirty
	*/

	background: #020;
	background: linear-gradient(12deg, #020, green);
	min-height:100%;

	/*
	CSS-Tricks Example
	by Chris Coyier
	http://css-tricks.com
	*/

	* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
	body { font: 14px Georgia, serif; }
	h1 { width: 660px; margin: 0 auto; padding: 20px 0; color: #222; }

	/**
	* The first commented line is your dabblet’s title
	*/


	body {

	font-family: copperplate;
	background-color: #D6AA39}
	h1 {color: #8C6D8D}

	<!-- content to be placed inside <body>…</body> -->
	<div class="lozenge red">99%</div>
	<div class="lozenge green">45%</div>
	<div class="lozenge yellow">100</div>
	<div class="lozenge blue"> 3%</div>
	<div class="lozenge grey">60%</div>

	<div class="lozenge red small">99%</div>
	<div class="lozenge green small">45%</div>
	<div class="lozenge yellow small">100</div>

	<!-- content to be placed inside <body>…</body> -->
	<div class="lozenge red">99%</div>
	<div class="lozenge green">45%</div>
	<div class="lozenge yellow">100</div>
	<div class="lozenge blue"> 3%</div>
	<div class="lozenge grey">60%</div>

	<div class="lozenge red small">99%</div>
	<div class="lozenge green small">45%</div>
	<div class="lozenge yellow small">100</div>

	function new_function( var1 = "", var2 = null ){
	// do something
	}

	new_function( "a", "b" );

	<!-- content to be placed inside <body>…</body> -->
	<div class="lozenge red"> 99</div>
	<div class="lozenge green"> 45</div>
	<div class="lozenge yellow">100</div>
	<div class="lozenge blue">  3</div>
	<div class="lozenge grey"> 60</div>

	<div class="lozenge red small"> 99</div>
	<div class="lozenge green small"> 45</div>
	<div class="lozenge yellow small">100</div>

	# temporarily disable Varnish
	# to make it easier to test changes
	Header add Cache-Control "max-age=1"

	RewriteEngine On

	# Existing files and directories remain accessible
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
	RewriteRule ^.* - [L]