Notes
Things we had to work out.
Written from work we have actually carried, which is why several of these are about the parts that go wrong rather than the parts that go well.
01
The redirect map is the deliverable
Everything else in a migration can be redone next quarter. Indexed URLs that lost their destination are gone, and so is whatever attention they were carrying.
4 min
02
M-Pesa phone numbers are personal data
Every Daraja callback hands you an MSISDN and a KYC name. Kenyan law treats both as personal data, and the obligations attach the moment you write them to a database.
4 min
03
A badge is only worth what removes it
Every platform builds the process that grants a verified badge. Almost none build the process that takes it away, which is the only part that gives the badge meaning.
3 min
04
The cutover runbook nobody writes
The build is finished, the redirects are verified, and the thing that takes the company down at midnight is a certificate nobody was watching.
3 min
05
You are paying twice to resize the same image
Content CDNs resize and format-negotiate images already. Putting a metered optimiser in front of one means the same picture is transformed twice and only the second pass appears on an invoice.
3 min
06
A station site should know if it is on air
A station has a real-time state at every moment: who is presenting, what is playing, whether the signal is up. Almost no station website reads it.
3 min
07
Building for the connection people actually have
A page that is quick on the machine it was built on and unusable on a five-year-old handset over mobile data has not been optimised. It has been measured in the wrong place.
3 min
Nothing here is a listicle and none of it was written to fill a schedule. Each one is a problem we hit, usually on a live site with an audience already on it, and the answer we settled on after getting it wrong at least once.