The Wiredcraft Stack

We’re working with clients across a lot of markets and industries: hospitality, retail, auto, and pharma brands (among others) in China, Japan, Australia, Singapore and the US.

We attribute a good deal of our success to “The Wiredcraft Way”, a 6-step process we use across all of our engagements, may it be helping build and scale Digital Products or consulting on Digital Acceleration and Digital Sales.

The Wiredcraft Way sets a lot of standards in terms of people, tools and processes.

And in particular, our team maintains a list of tools and technologies we’ve adopted and stick by for virtually everything we build with our clients: ”The Stack”.

What is “The Stack”?

First, a disclaimer: “The Stack” is very much inspired by Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar (and to a lesser extent the Forrester Wave and Gartner Magic Quadrant). These however tend to be focused a lot on trends or competitive benchmarks.

The Stack is different: it is highly opinionated and attempts to provide a single recommendation for each problem we’re trying to solve.

If you’re looking to learn about the latest and greatest tech, or compare tools, this is not it. What it does allow us to do is to create a strong foundation on top of which our teams can build their expertise and share knowledge.

Check "The Stack" on Airtable

How does it work?

Each entry in the Stack is categorized as such:

• Evaluate: new technology or tool that is being evaluated by the team.
• Use: proven tech that we recommend using for any new project.
• Deprecate: tools and technologies we’ve moved away from in favor of something else (which we usually mention).
• Avoid: tools and technologies we’ve evaluated and specifically ask the team to avoid.

For example, up until 2018, we were recommending the use of Jekyll for websites, we even rebuilt Starbucks’ website with it. We moved over to Gatsby shortly after but quickly moved to Next.js and have been using it across all projects for the past couple of years.

Gatsby and Jekyll are now labeled as “Deprecate” and all new projects are built with Next.js (“Use”). Our very own website is still running on Jekyll, but we’ll move to Next.js later on this year when we launch its new version.

Anybody on the team can make the case for adding a new entry, but it needs to be evaluated and accepted by relevant leaders. If it seems promising, we usually try it out on an internal or pilot project before taking a final decision.

Although it is primarily used by the Tech team at this stage, we’re extending it as well to Design, Data and Product teams. All of the current entries are intended for our Backend, Front-end, Mobile, DevOps and Quality teams.

What’s next…

Although the goal is for us to have a stable set of reliable tools and technology, we’re continuously updating the Stack. Twice a year, we’ll post about the latest changes: new and deprecated entries, the reason behind them, new categories we’re adding to our arsenal of solutions…

We’ll also include entries for Data, Design and Product in our next update.

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