The greatness and limitations of the js-framework-benchmark

I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on. So maybe it’s natural that I get a worried pit in my stomach over the current mania to rewrite every Node.js tool in … … Continue reading →

Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a good opportunity to reach across “the great divide” and try to find common ground rather than another opportunity to dunk on each other. Ryan Carniato started the […]

Recently I got an interesting performance bug on emoji-picker-element: I’m on a fedi instance with 19k custom emojis […] and when I open the emoji picker […], the page freezes for like a full second at least and overall performance stutters for a while after that. If you’re not familiar with Mastodon or the Fediverse, […]

Pop quiz: what emoji do you see below? [1] Depending on your browser and operating system, you might see: The flag of Martinique The old flag of Martinique (which kinda looks like the Quebecois flag) The enigmatic initials “MQ” This, frankly, is a mess. And it’s emblematic of how half-heartedly browsers and operating systems have […]

Writing good benchmarks is hard. Even if you grasp the basics of performance timings and measurements, it’s easy to fool yourself: You weren’t measuring what you thought you were measuring. You got the answer you wanted, so you stopped looking. You didn’t clean state between tests, so you were just measuring the cache. You didn’t […]