Tim Kaldec takes a look at our modern workflow – in which lots of tools have removed friction – and makes the case to add some “healthy friction”:
A lot of modern workflow improvements have been around removing friction. We want to make it easier to deploy rapidly. Tools like npm make it very easy to gain access to any and all modules we could think of. Tag management enables folks to very quickly add another third-party service.
All of these things, on the surface, provide some value, but the consequences are tremendous. Because these processes remove friction, they don’t ever really give us a chance to pause and consider what we’re doing.
Re-introducing some healthy friction, some moments of pause, in our processes is critical to ensuring a higher level of quality overall.
Examples would be installers that prevent you from installing large bundles, or build pipelines that mark the build as failed when the total bundle size exceeds a certain goal.