To a great degree, the value we’ve provided to our clients in recent years has been about security and legal compliance.
Security and Compliance
With the introduction of California’s CCPA and CPRA, clients have become more focused on keeping private information secure. Having helped John Muir Health comply with HIPAA standards two decades ago, we knew the value of protecting consumer privacy. It was refreshing to work with clients to improve data security outside of health information and ecommerce. The modern stance is to treat any personally-identifiable information as sensitive, including email addresses and beyond.
Part of the work we’ve been doing is to work with legal staff to understand what it takes to comply with laws, to implement the solution and to carefully document new policy. Even small teams must adopt the rigorous standards of the largest entities because everyone is now concerned with keeping their own information private. Presenting every visitor to a web site with a question about cookie consent surely helped with awareness.
Often, compliance means understanding and integrating services from SaaS vendors because the processes are too complex to solve with custom code. However, some customization must be applied to enable the client to work efficiently. Because 18INT has the chops to develop code as well as design the architecture, we can often be a single source for solutions. This describes the work done in the last several years with Electro and Clorox. The data volume is large and the stakes are high. Other times, we have advised only, supporting clients in helping themselves, as we have done recently for Reimagine.
Alas, most of the work in this realm has no visual component that can be shared with the public.
Code Mastery
Meanwhile, we have continued to provide technical leadership to Clorox through Electro Creative Workshop, their internal digital agency. We have guided the development process towards sophistication and modern standards, particularly with regard to code quality. All major modules used across the 100+ web sites hosted by Electro are covered by unit tests, most reaching 80% or better coverage. For the WordPress sites, we use PHPUnit. For Node.js modules, we use Vitest. The availability of LLM-based coding assistants have greatly improved productivity in generating unit tests, to the point where it can reasonably be expected that PRs for new components come along with the tests that prove they are correct.
With deep experience building Internet applications, we recognize the new technologies and techniques and how to apply them. Two major trends in recent years have been JavaScript becoming a viable server-side language and reliance on AI to automate programming tasks. We’ve been coding in Node.js on Next.js sites as Clorox moves away from WordPress. We ported a large library written in PHP 15 years before to modern Node, presented as a GitHub-hosted npm module. This facilitated the Hidden Valley Ranch and Kingsford sites shifting over from Pantheon to Vercel without changing the underlying database of consumer data. This was easy because the library was well-maintained all along with high unit test coverage and good documentation in the code comments.
Many practices of computer science are fundamental. They do not change with the time because they are principles. We remain convinced that coding is a craft where apprentices benefit from the mentoring of journeymen and masters. This can be seen when 18INT provides the fractional CTO role, otherwise known more lavishly as the “elder geek”. We continue to advise clients across the entire scale of the client team, sometimes advising programmers on proper technique and other times assisting product managers in selecting vendors. We contributed to a multi-year project at Clorox to select a CDP (customer data platform) vendor and then integrate it into the complex system ecosystem. Seeing the big picture, recognizing the pain points and being able to explain it to business owners remains one of our core strengths.
Web Site Projects
We continue to provide site-building services, usually paired with a design agency. In recent years, we’ve implemented two brand centers with Applied Design Works, and then built a site for their own business. The brand centers are interactive guides for marketers doing work for two health organizations, NYU Langone and Dartmouth Health. All three sites are built on WordPress using standard plugins and themes, with some customization that include unique blocks and child theme logic. As such, they are easy to maintain for IT teams without intimate knowledge of the code.
