We used Wardley Mapping to understand where each of the technical components required to ship our apps on Pick’n’Mix sit

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h the bones of a popular and long-running tabletop RPG universe known as Shadowrun, Hong Kong is the most recent iteration of the digitized version of the franchise. This is a world where magic and technology, humans and orcs, all coexist together. Set in 2056 the titular city is now known as the Hong Kong Free Enterprise Zone and, as you probably guessed, the enterprise is anything but free and the city is run by evil corporations with aspirations of dominance. The downtrodden live in a slum of nightmarish proportions and conditions, replete with the flashing neon signs and gangland turf wars once can expect in such an Asian cinema-inspired landscape. Your character is part of a group investigating what is going on in the city and how it connects to the corporations, and the plot unfolds from there.

The web is an amazing thing; it can turbocharge your ability to get things done and ship content anywhere, but it’s flexible too, making it easy to box yourself into a corner of unsustainable bespoke implementations, before you know it your once esoteric requirement is a web standard.

Interpreting machine learning models can seem complicated at first, but libraries like SHAP make everything as easy as a function call. We even don’t have to worry about data visualization, as there are built-in functions for that.

We can visualize the importance of the features and their impact on the prediction by plotting summary charts. The one below sorts features by the sum of SHAP value magnitudes over all samples. It also uses SHAP values to show the distribution of the impacts each feature has.

Menu systems, however, were only needed in the app deployable to enable discoverability of content. This meant that menus were built exclusively for Pick’n’Mix and as such we historically required the engineers building menu systems to develop, test, and deliver the menus as fully-fledged ‘Pick’n’Mix’ apps. A very closely coupled integration. This is an important nuance; we were asking engineers to deliver us HTML5 content to run exclusively on a proprietary platform.

The emails started coming in 2018, the same year my book So You Want to Talk About Race came out. They would usually arrive after I had posted an article on race or gender, but sometimes they would appear at random. I still remember the first one, which shook me.

To support this, we had to provide means for engineers to test and develop their menus within Pick’n’Mix itself, adding a “development harness” to the pile of proprietary things we’re having to build and maintain ourselves. This nuance cuts even deeper - though, by requiring HTML5 apps to be delivered to a proprietary set of standards, we were moving further and further away from new and emerging web standards. This meant we were unable to take advantage of fantastic resources like MDN, and fundamentally in a position where 80% of the underlying runtime had to be supported by us.

This also led to us having significant amounts of duplication across our portfolio of apps. UX patterns implemented time and time again written imperatively with WebGL/Canvas, several integrations and duplicated business logic around how downloads should be handled under certain network conditions, inconsistent bundling tools and inconsistent config approaches across apps.

This platform complexity, coupled with immature frameworks and the business requirement to ship web apps to app stores, led us to spinning up an internal engineering team to create a proprietary app wrapping framework. This framework would be capable of bundling HTML5 web content and generating iOS and Android binaries from that content.

As an immigrant, you get to be excited about America’s future while taking a mulligan on its past. As a Portuguese immigrant, well… my people were in shipping. We are the foundation of America’s past.

Pick’n’Mix provided a heap of functionality to its embedded web content, including the ability to download and store remote content from a CDN to disk, UI overlays for app settings and download management, analytics events, push notification support, and many other features. This functionality was built from scratch and solely maintained by our internal native engineering team.

Interpreting machine learning models can seem complicated at first, but libraries like SHAP make everything as easy as a function call. We even don’t have to worry about data visualization, as there are built-in functions for that.

Fundamentally, Pick’n’Mix was a WebView/WKWebView with a JS “bridge” capable of passing messages between content running within the WebView to trigger certain actions on the web/native side. This bridge was a “standard” we maintain internally called the Games Messaging Interface (or GMI). This GMI ensures that games are interoperable between many platforms and abstracts away the nuances from game developers of having to worry about the runtime.

Due to Pick’n’Mix’s un-opinionated stance on how things should be built, each app had to maintain its build pipelines and menus/games had to orchestrate their own interaction with the GMI, ultimately there was no sharing or composability between apps. On the surface, abstracting native functionality and business logic behind the GMI seemed sensible and good value for money, a single, well-defined API for fetching remote data, right?! Digging into this further though, it was clear that we’d simply offset the cost away from agencies having to build the native functionality (which is good in itself) to agencies having to integrate with an API that was just as complex and potentially more un-intuitive than if we did nothing at all.

Pick’n’Mix was monolithic, it was a semantically versioned framework that every app had to depend on and bundle itself into. Pick’n’Mix did not stipulate how apps should build themselves, none of our apps were running on the same version of Pick’n’Mix and each time an app needed to take a new version upgrades were laborious and expensive from a development and testing perspective.