August 2021 Summaries

In today's fast-paced ecommerce landscape, customers expect websites that cater to their shopping needs and provide seamless digital experiences. To stay competitive, brands need nimble tools that enable agile development, experimentation, and adaptation to market forces. Many legacy monolithic systems hinder this, but API-first tools and composable architecture offer a solution, allowing teams to work in parallel and turn out features quickly. A progressive re-platforming approach can help decouple the UX layer from the legacy system, reducing risks and enhancing user experience. Brands that adopt agile practices and use the right tools can thrive despite uncertain times.

### Summary The article explains how to integrate Contentful into a Vue.js project, using GraphQL to fetch data from the API. It covers setting up Contentful by creating content types and fields, adding data to these types, and then fetching this data in a Vue application using GraphQL queries. The example uses a Vue project called TheaterLog to demonstrate how to manage data for shows, including theater locations and ratings. By following this tutorial, developers can easily integrate Contentful into their own projects and manage their data efficiently.

The builder ethos recognizes the importance of cross-functional, autonomous digital teams that can build and deliver digital experiences faster. To create purpose-built teams, companies must adjust the mix of roles and skills on their digital teams to support specific goals. The two primary teams are platform teams, which focus on building core tools and accelerators, and experience teams, which focus on content and creative work. Platform teams are typically smaller, with 5-10 members, and are responsible for building reusable components that improve efficiency of experience teams. Experience teams, on the other hand, are focused on delivering digital experiences and tend to have a mix of strategy, content, design, creative, and insights roles. Companies can build better software faster by assembling purpose-built teams with the right skills and adjusting their organizational structure to support collaboration between technical and marketing functions.

We're working towards creating an inclusive web for people of all abilities, and our design system, Forma 36, is a perpetual work in progress. We recently focused on color accessibility, aiming to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) without compromising aesthetics. Our journey involved learning about color spaces, such as sRGB and CIELAB, and adopting new tools like chroma.js. We developed a Figma plugin that takes our base blue as input and generates a full palette of colors using the HCL color space. The key to our success was creating a unified color scale with consistent contrast ratios and perceptual uniformity, ensuring that our colors are predictable and easy to use. By balancing aesthetics and accessibility, we've created a color system that is both effective and usable for people with different abilities.

Structured content is a way of organizing and formatting content in a machine-readable format, allowing it to be easily understood by both humans and computers. This approach enables collaboration, standardization, and consideration for the future, much like the Australian railway network benefits from such principles. By creating structured content, organizations can avoid the chaos that arises when stakeholders work independently without considering the bigger picture. Structured content has several benefits, including increased reusability, improved personalization, and enhanced analytics. It also makes working with multiple channels and publishing to various devices more straightforward. In contrast to the Australian railway network, which suffered from poor coordination between states, structured content provides a unified system that saves time, money, frustration, and ultimately customers in the long run.

In the pursuit of health and happiness, people try practices seen in some of the healthiest and happiest communities on earth — forest bathing, hygge or a daily glass of wine. Unfortunately, focusing on these individual practices overlooks the importance of culture and mindset. The same is true when implementing agile practices in the digital-first era. Agile methods require an open-minded organizational culture where teams can thrive. This includes replicating the feeling of autonomy and motivation seen in bootstrap startups, where founders prioritize and focus on activities for survival and growth. Building autonomous teams with a mix of skills and resources is vital to replicate this feeling. While agile teams need speed and clear prioritization, they also require time to identify the right problem and define success metrics. Involving team members from different roles in customer conversations helps gather diverse perspectives and surface patterns. Agile is about continuous improvement and adapting to change, not implementing a method perfectly. It's essential to give teams permission to try new things, learn from successes and failures, and evolve their process as they grow.

The current process of running database migrations had limitations, including relying on a single engineer to monitor metrics across multiple instances, keeping track of migration status, and only allowing migrations during office hours. To address these issues, a new approach was developed using a `metrics service` that delegates work to `metric providers`, which can be specific to one metrics source without changing the `metrics service`. The `migration runner` schedules periodic calls to the `metrics service` to determine if the migration should be stopped or not, and uses signals to control the execution of the migration. This approach allows for more efficient monitoring, 24/7 migration execution, and reduced engineer burden.

You're likely suffering from impostor syndrome if you feel like a fraud, constantly doubt your abilities, avoid taking risks or sharing ideas, or feel like you don't deserve your success. Recognizing these feelings and acknowledging that they are impacting your work is a huge step in the right direction. Many people suffer from impostor syndrome, including some of your colleagues, so building a support system with peers can be relieving. Don't let perfectionism hold you back; it's okay to make mistakes and learn from them. Celebrating your successes, trying new things, and using the fear of failure as a motivator can help overcome impostor syndrome. As a designer, you're likely susceptible due to the evolving nature of digital product design, needing to fight for a seat at the table, being introspective, leaning towards perfectionism, and sometimes lacking inclusion, equity, and diversity competency in your workplace.

SWAROVSKI OPTIK, a family-run outdoor supplies brand, underwent a rapid digital growth spurt and realized its digital experience had become fragmented across regions, product segments, and languages. The company teamed up with Contentful solutions partner Bright IT to transition from a legacy monolithic CMS to an API-first content platform that was flexible, customizable, and performant. With Contentful, SWAROVSKI OPTIK overcame challenges related to localization, flexibility, and operational efficiency, enabling its editorial team to reuse translated content across locales, reduce manual translation lift, and improve collaboration with local translation partners. The company also leveraged a third-party translation integration, partnered with commercetools for a lightning-fast storefront experience, and used a React framework to deliver ready-HTML to the client's browser and reduce file size. These changes enabled SWAROVSKI OPTIK to improve its editorial operations, enhance customer experiences, and support its digital transformation.