Of all the tech-focused year-in-review posts I read, Guillermo Rauch’s is my favorite. There is a lot in there, jumping from topics like modern architectures, high-fiving specific apps, and philosophical movements.
I’ll pick one quote about the rise of “deploy previews”:
A salient feature is the transition we are seeing away from code review into deployment preview.
Code review is undeniably important (specially speedy code review), but nothing beats teams collaborating by sharing URLs to the actual sites that are being worked on and experiencing them directly.
Having a URL for every single push to every single branch (or at least for every single Pull Requestยน is huge. This isn’t just “staging.” It’s like Super Staging, and Jamstack makes it possible. Both Netlify and ZEIT do it automatically.
Not only does it help the author (and her co-workers) check out the changes on a production replica, it helps out a pile of automation tools that can run against these URLs, making for way more stable development workflows.
- GitHub calls them “Pull Requests” but I use GitLab just as much which calls them “Merge Requests,” so I never know which to write. “Pull/Merge Requests” is awkward at best and confusing at worst. I don’t use Bitbucket much, but they are Pull Requests there. I guess I’ll let that tip the scales and just say Pull Request from now on.
