
Redesigning Heap Without a Feature Branch - drob
https://heap.io/blog/engineering/redesigning-heap-without-a-feature-branch
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awhitty
Hey! Author here. After talking to folks who have taken on similar projects at
their jobs, I realized there wasn't much discussion around how to happily pull
off a UI refresh or redesign, and I wanted to share the philosophy we used to
make ours a success!

I'm happy to chat and compare notes about how folks have executed similar
projects.

~~~
WorldMaker
I've done some somewhat similar efforts in the past. One thing to point out is
that on the something.original.css and something.refreshed.css to avoid code
duplication: since y'all were already using LESS as a build process, code
duplication shouldn't be a huge problem with LESS importing the original from
the refreshed. I found the LESS compiler to be quite good at coalescing
complicated overrides of imported base styles to a final, simpler final build
output.

Though the last time I did this sort of thing I definitely couldn't have used
CSS Variables. That seems like a good solution for modern browsers with or
without a compiler like LESS.

~~~
awhitty
That sounds like a reasonable approach! Thanks for the note.

To be honest, we use LESS fairly simply for the things it provides like
variables, mixins, and nested selector syntax. We otherwise haven't had a need
to make our stylesheets much more sophisticated. So when project planning came
around, we didn't ideate much on LESS-based approaches, and I bet we could
have and found an ergonomic approach there.

