Writing

A good alt text can conjure up wonderfully stimulating mental images. A friendly smile is the same in print, photo or wax crayon. Whether you listen to an image or see it, the emotional response is the key factor, so why should we recommend that these emotion rich images should be given a null alt text and hidden from screen reader users?

You can take Paul out of dev-rel, but you can't take the dev-rel out of Paul. Or something.

Really enjoying Paul's videos. They're entertaining, really high quality and super useful.

Clever stuff from Nolan about trying to measure the complete cost of a component—not just the JS execution.

This was a really fascinating post about trying to make a web site—from design down to the hardware that powers it—as energy efficient as possible. This is certainly at the extreme end of optimization, which is what made it so interesting.

They do admit that since the server is powered via solar, it's possible they may have some downtime. I bet they could provide themselves with another layer of protection with a small service worker.

Jeremy was good enough to take the time to write about how he prepped for his latest talk (something he had teased awhile back).

It's always fun to see the similarities and differences between how other people prep and how I do.

I always love seeing how other people approach writing a new talk. Jeremy was kind enough to share some snapshots of his prep.

What a fantastic deep-dive! Antin walks through how Google Photos built a performant photo grid in great detail. There's a lot of careful thinking in here and some clever solutions.

At times I think "will anyone reads this, does anyone care?", but I always publish it anyway — and that's for two reasons. First it's a place for me to find stuff I may have forgotten how to do. Secondly, whilst some of this stuff is seemingly super-niche, if one person finds it helpful out there on the web, then that's good enough for me. After all I've lost count of how many times I've read similar posts that have helped me out.

We need to be able to candidly and thoughtfully talk about technology without people assuming you’re calling that technology and the people who create/use it garbage. We have to be mindful of the community we’re fostering, and encourage people to freely discuss all this stuff without getting dog piled on.

The Tarot Cards of Tech are a set of provocations designed to help creators more fully consider the impact of technology.

Some important questions here to answer before building any new piece of technology.

Harry's been doing a lot of digging into third-party performance in his performance work and he was kind enough to share his process with the rest of us. Lots of good ideas here!

What a great overview of how NerdWallet made their site significantly faster (6s faster time to visually complete as measured on a 3G network) in the last 6 months or so.

Surma talks about the different ways of forcing an element to be on its own element, and—most interestingly—the side-effects of each.