When managing a project of known scope, understanding the time required to complete the project (or a piece of the project) with available resources is critical to the ability to plan effectively and appropriately set expectations with stakeholders.

Naturally, workers of differing skill levels will complete a given task at different rates—i.e. a highly skilled worker will work more quickly than a low skilled worker. This fundamental truth of labor can present a significant challenge when estimating timelines in man-hours, as estimates produced by one worker may not hold true for another.

Story points may be used as an alternative to man-hours when planning projects, but before we start using story points, we must understand what story points are and why they are useful.

Learn how to use story points

Google has a long standing tradition of introducing changes to it’s search engine designed to enhance user experience, and Google’s dominance as a search provider essentially mandates the adoption of Google’s prescribed best practices. AMP promises to make the web faster, but embracing AMP might be more complicated than you would expect.

Learn how AMP impacts content creators.

In August 2015, Adobe and PageFair reported that ad blocking grew 41% globally year-over-year, with 16% of the US online population blocking ads during Q2 2015. A second PageFair report revised in November 2016 found that 16% of global smartphone users are blocking ads.

In June 2016, the Interactive Advertising Bureau reported 26% of 1292 desktop users sampled and 15% of 201 mobile users sampled had an ad blocker installed. In the same report, the IAB found that users primarily blame slow loading advertisements for poor page performance, and that users found ads that block content to be the most annoying. The report also revealed advertisements that forced user attention received the least attention.

With poor web performance being highly publicized and largely attributed to advertising and tracking scripts, it’s no surprise that users are more frequently opting to install AdBlockers and content blockers¹. Many popular content blockers make it trivial for users to block tracking scripts in addition to advertisements.

To combat this, tech giants have developed methods of speeding up the mobile web. By offering priority placement to content creators in exchange for control over how content is presented (with a limited subset of features), technology companies are hoping to overcome user’s main frustrations with advertising and performance, and take home a piece of the action. Facebook developed Instant Articles, Google and Twitter united to develop AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), and Apple ships the News app with every new iOS device.

These changes have received significant attention from the web marketing and development communities, raising concerns over data ownership, monetization, privacy and the future of the web platform.

I’m intrigued by the emphasis on speed… with things like Instant Articles, native is making the browser-based web look like a relic even just for publishing articles… [which] might pose a problem even for my overwhelmingly-text work. [My website’s] pages load fast, but the pages I link to often don’t. I worry that the inherent slowness of the web and ill-considered trend toward over-produced web design is going to start hurting traffic to [my site].

– Facebook Introduces Instant Articles by John Gruber

Can we improve things without building anything?

Digital build projects have a habit of starting life as little more than an idea that quickly becomes an inevitability…

We reach for digital build projects as solutions because they are actually easier than dealing with the underlying problems – i.e. why we are failing to meet users needs and organization goals.

– Liam King Net Magazine, Issue 288, January 2017 Page 30

Publishers are so preoccupied with engagement that they’ve forgotten that making things easier for the user makes things better for the user:

“Engagement” is a common business goal for the design of so many websites, apps, and services… When you say “engagement,” I now hear “theft of attention.”… we vie for attention. We notify and nag… we design for distraction, and we call it engagement.

– Connected // Disconnected by Josh Clark

And making things better for the user is the whole point:

We as human beings are trying to maximize our signal and minimize the amount of noise we’re exposed to. Our willingness to be inconvenienced, interrupted, and insulted is dwindling. We’re finding more ways to circumvent bullshit, whether it’s through tools like ad-blockers or actions like cutting cable.

…people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time. So we as creators have a decision to make: do we want to be part of the 90% of noise out there, or do we want to be part of the 10% of signal?

– Death to Bullshit by Brad Frost

Unfortunately, it seems, the cry of “complexity is the enemy!” is lost on the ones setting the technical agenda. While trying to load every single tracking cookie possible on your users, you’ve steered them away by making your site slow on any reasonable broadband connection, and nearly impossible on any mobile connection.

The secret is that “page weight”… isn’t the problem. Bandwidth is not the problem, and the performance of the web will not improve as broadband access becomes more widespread.

The problem is latency… Latency is governed… by the speed of light. Which means that latency isn’t going anywhere.

– Page Weight Doesn’t Matter by Nate Berkopec

On Apache servers, a RedirectMap may be used to import bulk redirects. This provides an ideal solution for creating a self-hosted short URL service for any website, particularly static sites generated with Jekyll.

Create your own static site shortener with Jekyll and Apache

Frontend developers have long known that CSS nth-child selectors may be combined to yield interesting and practical results. Most commonly, this technique is applied to select all items in a list when there are more than N children, less than N children, exactly N children, or between N and M children. However these simple selectors may also be combined in other ways to produce even more advanced selectors.

Learn how to use complex CSS nth-child selectors