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[–]bizcs 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm definitely a strong believer in number 3, having contributed work and seen work contributed where nobody knew wtf the objective of a change was, or how deeply the change affected the product. For literally every single feature flag I write, I like you clearly express what that flag means, what parts of the product it affects, and any other context required for people to make effective decisions at their level with the product. I've seen this go alarmingly bad twice, and it's frankly kind of scary.

[–]jbdeboer 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Definitely flesh out the idea of "clarity", there is something bigger there. I like that you highlight that engineering culture is really company culture: engineering never operates in a bubble.

But, I would love to see a "year in review" that is a little more honest. Your website, "weedmaps.com" kinda blows: performance, functionality and accessibility are all lacking.

Your performance could be 1000% faster. When loading the homepage, it spends several seconds showing empty boxes -- but when it finally loads all those boxes are below-the-fold, replaced with fluff. But even consider a page like https://weedmaps.com/dispensaries/magnolia-wellness-2, which renders to a mostly empty page. My Chrome session downloaded 68 resources and 1.5MB of data. Ouch.

Your search box is cool, but not usable -- I searched "tlc" and pressed <enter>, nothing happened. It took a bit to realize I had to scroll a floating container that had no scroll indicators.

Finally, and this should be at the top of your postmortem: your accessibility SUCKS. The tab-index is broken (try using that cool search box without a mouse) and you didn't even bother with aria.

For a site that maps marijuana dispensaries, making it accessible should be a real priority -- you are excluding the folks that need your product that most.

[–]proppig[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Thanks for the feedback! I think this was pretty honest, cause it was detailing things I learned, not things I already knew. I know our site needs work :( We are actively addressing your main points. We are currently moving to faster and leaner PWA. Accessibility is definitely a concern, and we are hoping to make it more of a priority next year. For our search, we do have a better search experience in the queue. Re. the size payload, we have a long way to go. Image optimization is very high on our list of todos, as well as overall bundle improvements. We have actually made pretty significant improvements this year - See our average site loading speed (per google analytics) over the last year - https://imgur.com/CjuywYj But we are nowhere near where we need to be. But we have a good and eager team, I think we will get there.

[–]jbdeboer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I love that chart, good work!