Writing
Posts, links, and the occasional book review.
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Book Review -
Book Review Educated
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Use the :lang pseudo-class over the lang attribute selector for language-specific styles
∞ PermalinkOoo...this is smart. Ire explains why you should use the
:langpseudo-class instead of the[lang='']attribute selector. -
The Ethics of Web Performance
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Book Review Head On
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What I Read in 2018
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JavaScript and Civil Rights | Deque
∞ PermalinkFantastic post from Marcy about the consequences of the way we build, and how we can improve.
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Performance Calendar » HTTP/2 Prioritization
∞ PermalinkPat has been doing some intense research around HTTP/2 prioritization which lead to this magnificent post discussing how each browser handles priorities (not well, for the most part) and also provides a handy test page for checking how CDN's and servers are doing.
Andy has already taken that page and started tracking how CDN's are doing (again, not well for most of them).
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An Alfred Workflow for WebPageTest
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Risking a Homogeneous Web
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What If? – CSS Wizardry – CSS Architecture, Web Performance Optimisation, and more, by Harry Roberts
∞ PermalinkWhile ever you build under the assumption that things will always work smoothly, you’re leaving yourself completely ill-equipped to handle the scenario that they don’t.
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Keeping It WEIRD
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Second Meaningful Content: the Worst Performance Metric | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA
∞ PermalinkI rather like Scott's term for what happens when you use client-side JavaScript for A/B testing.
This pattern leads to such a unique effect on page load that at last week's Perf.Now() Conference, I coined a new somewhat tongue-in-cheek performance metric called "Second Meaningful Content," which occurs long after the handy First Meaningful Content (or Paint) metric, which would otherwise mark the time at which a page starts to appear usable.
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A More Ergonomic Setup
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Book Review The Real World of Technology
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Bruce Lawson's personal site : Screenreader support for text-level semantics
∞ PermalinkBrucey-kins on how semantic markup like
andis interpreted by screenreaders. -
Performance Postmortem: Mapbox Studio
∞ PermalinkLovely performance "postmortem" from Eli Fitch about how MapBox got their first-meaningful-paint to drop from 4.7s to 1.9 seconds.
Some good insights into technical optimizations, but as always, the cultural aspects are the most difficult–and the most important.
Nurturing cultural awareness and enthusiasm for building fast, snappy, responsive, tactile products is arguably the most effective performance improvement you can make, but can be the most challenging, and requires the most ongoing attention.
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My take on chief ethics officers — Cennydd Bowles
∞ PermalinkCennydd expands on something he discussed in his (excellent) book, Future Ethics: why hiring a chief ethics officer may not be a particularly effective approach.
A chief ethics officer would be too distanced from product and design orgs, where most ethical decisions are made; their duties would come into conflict with those of the CFO, who is already on the hook for financial ethics; and the seniority of the role would mean this person would be seen as an ethical arbiter, an oracle who passes ethical judgment. This is IMO a failure state for ethics. Loading ethical responsibility onto a sole enlightened exec doesn’t scale, and it reduces the chance of genuine ethical discourse within companies by individualising the problem.
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The Three Types of Performance Testing – CSS Wizardry – CSS Architecture, Web Performance Optimisation, and more, by Harry Roberts
∞ PermalinkI like Harry's categorization for performance testing:
I try to distill the types of testing that we do into three distinct categories: Proactive, Reactive, and Passive.
I've been using "Active" and "Passive" myself and found that it really helps companies better understand why having both synthetic and RUM monitoring in place is important. I really like the way Harry breaks that "Active" category out further based on whether the tests are run proactively or reactively.
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Making GOV.UK pages load faster and use less data - Technology in government
∞ PermalinkRemoving the Base64 encoded font has reduced the total page weight by 16% (75 KB) per request (assuming no caching). This may not sound like a huge difference, but GOV.UK receives approximately 48 million visitors per month, so this adds up to mobile users saving approximately 800 GB per month, cumulatively. This is especially important to users on older mobile devices and expensive data plans.