3 minute read
Orange juice
from Orange juice
by Katerina
THE #NEW ISSUU ISSUE
Carefully Crafted, Freshly Squeezed
When I joined issuu as a Senior Product Owner exactly one year ago, the thing I first noticed was the care and passion with which everything here is crafted. From the beautiful content being uploaded by publishers to the animated discussions of technical architecture, an acute attention to detail was everywhere I looked. These were definitely my kind of people.
During my first week at issuu, I was thrown into a major project — at the time no one knew how big it was going to be — rewriting the core of issuu from scratch. Initially, we were driven by the upcoming changes in the browsers (i.e. the slow death of Flash). However, as we started digging into it, it turned out to be so much more than just about technology. We were re-engineering and redesigning issuu to be ready for the future. Despite working under taxing deadlines, I’m proud to say we still questioned everything and chose better over faster.
With this premier issue of ORANGE JUICE we’ll share the story of our remarkable yearlong journey. It’s definitely not your typical tech story about a shiny new feature or an amazing growth story. It’s much grittier than that. Our story is about the dedication, hard work and sheer guts necessary to rebuild the very core of a massive existing product. And we figured what better vehicle to tell our story than the one that hundreds of thousands of issuu publishers use to tell theirs each month. It’s also the perfect opportunity for us to show off all the big little details we’ve built into issuu’s incredible new reading experience.
Happy reading!
Alette Holmberg-Nielsen Editor in Chief
Words by Joel Barnard, llustrations by Maya Gürtler Lorentzen
If there’s one constant in the technology game, it’s change.The better, faster, smarter version is always just around the corner. Sometimes no one sees it coming. Sometimes its arrival date is plastered on every blog, bus and billboard. And in the case of the imminent demise of browser and mobile support for Flash (the core technology issuu’s reading experience was built on), it has been a long time coming. Smartphones never had(real) Flash support, and the desktop browsers announced they would finally be pulling the plug “sometime” in 2016.
Staring down the barrel of this unknown deadline, we facedthe dilemma other companies had faced before — could we change the experience millions of people already love in ways that would make them love it even more? Would it be possible to rebuild such a large plane mid-flight? And how much time would we have to do it? One thing we knew for certain is we would stay true to our philosophy of not rushing products to market that we couldn’t be proud of. Of course, this time the stakes were much higher. It was a race we couldn’t lose. And yet, no one knew if doing things the right way would allow us to reach the finish line in time.
More Juicy Bits Ahead
At issuu, we continuously roll out improvements to our products. Even though this new reading experience is a huge change, it’s no different in the sense that we always break larger projects into multiple releases and ship them one at a time. With this project we’ve already rolled out the majority of the biggest changes to the issuu reading experience. Hopefully you’ve already noticed the performance improvements and the experience’s new look and feel. But wait, there’s more!
In the coming months we’ll continue to optimize for speed and release other features that will make the reading experience even better on all devices, browsers and screen sizes. This new and improved issuu is the foundation for our future. We’re thrilled you’re along for the ride, and we can’t wait to share what else we have in store.
