Technical Cost vs. Product Benefit

Frontend First

Sam and Ryan talk about the difference between the costs of building a feature and the benefits that feature brings to our end users. They discuss how libraries and frameworks can lower the technical cost of building a given feature, how Ryan Florence framed this calculation in his talk at Big Sky Dev Con, and how sometimes developers’ opinions and tastes about tech can smuggle their way from the cost side of the equation into the benefit side.

Topics include:

• 0:00 - Intro
• 6:53 - How Ryan Florence framed the problem in his talk “Mind the Gap”
• 14:38 - How frontend frameworks and backend frameworks both have their own ways of crossing the network gap
• 19:11 - How Network-Sensitive Interactions force technologies to grapple with both server and client environments
• 23:02 - How React is trying to lower the cost of moving interactions between the server and client with Server Components and Server Actions
• 26:53 - Why “Use the right tool for the job” doesn’t capture the dynamic requirements of living software
• 31:53 - How discussions about the product benefits of a feature and the technical costs of that feature are often conflated with each other
• 34:08 - A thought experiment from economics that highlights how uncertainty plays a role in the estimation of product benefits
• 56:54 - How to think about tech choice independently of the estimation of product benefits

Links:

• "Mind the Gap" by Ryan Florence
• Zero-JavaScript View Transitions in Astro