Year: 2013

How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity

How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity

Developers tend to spectacularly underestimate the effort involved in such a rewrite (more on that below), and spectacularly overestimate the value generated (more on that below, as well).

Actions in Gmail

gmail actions

I think this is the greatest innovation in web-based email since Gmail’s own release of large mailboxes (what was it? 1 GB?).   Web mail has all the benefits of a website, but offers greater contextual focus.   Adding specific actions to message has been a possible with extensions and plugins for a long time, but those were traditionally added by the recipient.  Giving such power to the sender is quite interesting.

Of course, there will be a variety of misuses – spam, phishing, etc – but, I’m sure there will be an even greater variety of useful functionality.  Like this “Send money with Gmail” example.  Here is more information on what’s possible.