Releasing a Major Update
Releasing a Major Update
We had a number of important features to add for Sketch 3.0; Symbols, improved Shared Styles and an improved Export workflow being among the most important ones. And we also wanted to see if we could gain some speed improvements in the process.
And we wanted to do these things without having to rewrite too much code. My biggest fear going into this process was that we fall into the common trap of rewriting too much – or worse, everything.
I’ve seen it happen too many times with major updates of other well-known apps; after much cruft and rubbish has piled up during 1.x development, engineering declares that 2.0 has to be a total rewrite and consequently spends 4 years re-writing it into a new app.
The development cycle of version 3.0 took us around 6 months from start to finish and we were done before the deadline we had set ourselves at the start. I’m immensely proud of this achievement and everybody at the company has been nothing short of amazing in helping us get there.
In the next post I want to explore the engineering philosophy at Bohemian Coding which I think can be described as ‘Working Effectively with Legacy Code’.
