(2017-08-24) Hybrid Development Is How We Give Our Teams Of Three Superpowers

Hybrid development is how we give our teams of three superpowers

We just launched a major revamp of the schedule in Basecamp 3. New calendar grid, new day drill-down, new navigation across months. It’s a big change, and we rolled it out simultaneously across five platforms: Web, Windows Desktop, OS X Desktop, iOS, and Android.

Three people did the work in less than six weeks.

Three people launched a major new feature across five platforms in six weeks because of their hybrid-development superpowers. Powers derived from using basic web technologies, Ruby on Rails, Turbolinks, and the Majestic Monolith.

These six weeks included all sorts of experimentation, back-and-forth, and trade-offs. It was both research and development. A flexible, fluid spec that we honed as we went along.

This industry often speaks of the 10x developer, and not a lot about the 10x environment. I think the latter is much more reproducible.

one intern programmer, one senior programmer, and one senior designer delivering this major upgrade in six weeks.

And sure, you probably could eek out the last few percent of interface fidelity if you went all native everywhere on a feature like this. But the price of going from 95% Good Enough to 100% Verified Native is orders of magnitude. Some times those orders are worth it, but the vast majority of the time, they’re not.