Writing

Harry started a newsletter late last year, and it's been pretty fun—I particularly enjoy the cocktail recipe in each issue.

His latest issue mentions this really well-done video from TED-ed about sorting algorithms. The video uses an example of having to sort a pile of books and does a really nice job of illustrating the differences between the various algorithms at your disposal.

Fun visualization of 1,000 American's activity over the course of an average day.

Run from data-driven companies. In thrall to semi-science and blinded by their dogma, they’ve lost the ability to see intelligent alternative perspectives on their business, their products, and the world. Embrace instead data-informed companies. This isn’t mere grammatical pedantry — a company genuinely informed by data understands the risks of datafication and adopts sophisticated, balanced approaches to strategy that blend quant, qual, and even some of that unfashionable prediction and intuition.

Pretty impressive investigation and creative work done by the GitHub folks to make their diff pages, some of the slowest on the site, three times faster.

I love companies that are as invested in giving back to the community as they are at doing quality web-work. The Guardian is certainly one of them, and their latest post is a great example. They walk through several errors and mistakes they made on their site this year, why those mistakes were made, and how they fixed them.

Great introduction to the various different types of browser caches by Yoav Weiss, told as a tale about Questy's Journey. The illustrations by Yoav's daughter, Yaara, are also wonderful.

Matt Griffin's wonderful documentary about the web is now available to stream for free on Vimeo.

Here’s the thing: the more we experience how other browsers work, the more we learn about how different users experience our websites.

Tim started a "micro-cast" called "Ok, Get This" about oddities that he has come across. The first two episodes were a lot of fun to listen to.

Sarah has written a really useful post about the different roles animation can play. Naturally, I was really happy to see her talking about the impact on perceived performance:

Animation also aids in perceived performance. Viget conducted a study where they measured user engagement with a standard loading GIF versus a custom animation. Customers were willing to wait almost twice as long for the custom loader, even though it wasn’t anything very fancy or crazy. Just by showing their users that they cared about them, they stuck around, and the bounce rates dropped.

In most cases, I'd argue, it would be even better to provide some sort of feedback to the user about what is happening in the background, but the same general idea applies: taking the time to design for when processes take too long is important.

Vitaly published a lengthy checklist of performance optimizations, which I was more than happy to review. There are PDF and Apple Pages versions available of the list if that's your cup of tea.