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2020’s Crypto Performances: The Biggest Token Losers and This Year’s Top-Performing Cryptocurrencies
7.12.2020
Digital currency markets have climbed significantly in value all year long, despite the gloomy global economy and the aftermath of Covid-19 responses. Bitcoin prices have been hovering at values not seen since 2017, and the top crypto asset in terms of market cap has gained a whopping 159% since...
Web Performance Calendar
7.12.2020
The Web Performance Calendar just started up again this year. The first two posts so far are about, well, performance! First up, Rick Viscomi writes about the mythical “fast” web page:
How you approach measuring a web page’s performance can tell you whether it’s built for speed or whether it feels...
The Core Web Vitals hype train
24.11.2020
Some baby bear thinking from Katie Sylor-Miller:
my excitement for Core Web Vitals is tempered with a healthy skepticism. I’m not yet convinced that Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are the right metrics that all sites should...
Measuring Core Web Vitals with Sentry
17.11.2020
Chris made a few notes about Core Web Vitals the other day, explaining why measuring these performance metrics are so gosh darn important:
I still think the Google-devised Core Web Vitals are smart. When I first got into caring about performance, it was all: reduce requests! cache things! Make...
A Complete Guide to CSS Gradients
17.11.2020
Like how you can use the background-color property in CSS to declare a solid color background, you can use the background-image property not only to declare image files as backgrounds but gradients as well. Using CSS gradients is better for control and performance than using an actual image (of...
SVGBOX
13.11.2020
I’ve been saying for years that a pretty good icon system is just dropping in icons with inline <svg> where you need them. This is simple to do, offers full design control, has (generally) good performance, and means you aren’t smurfing around with caching and browser support...
Gold Price Expected to Rally Despite Concerns About Lockdown 2.0
5.11.2020
Gold industry players say the inevitable printing of new money by the U.S. will lead to an increase in the circulating supply of fiat currency. This increase, in turn, will further dilute the value of U.S. currency and thus diminish its perceived status as the world’s foremost reserve...
Limit Promise Concurrency with pool
3.11.2020
Methods like Promise.all, Promise.allSettled, Promise.race, and the rest are really excellent for managing multiple Promises, allowing for our apps to embrace async and performance. There are times, however, that limiting the number of concurrent operations may be useful, like rate limiting...
GIFS and prefers-reduced-motion
3.11.2020
The <picture> element has a trick it can do where it shows different image formats in different situations. If all you are interested in is formats for the sake of performance, maybe you’d do:
<picture<source srcset="img/waterfall.avif" type="image/avif"<source...
More on content-visibility
28.10.2020
Back in August 2020, when the content-visiblity property in CSS trickled its way into Chrome browsers, Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin wrote about it and we covered it. The weirdest part is that to get the performance value out of it, you pair it with contain-intrinsic-size on these big chunks...
How Hacker News Crushed David Walsh Blog
28.10.2020
Earlier this month, David’s heartfelt posting about leaving Mozilla made the front page of Hacker News. Traffic increased by 800% to his already-busy website, which slowed and eventually failed under the pressure. Request Metrics monitors performance and uptime for David’s blog, and our metrics...
Core Web Vital Tooling
26.10.2020
I still think the Google-devised Core Web Vitals are smart. When I first got into caring about performance, it was all: reduce requests! cache things! Make stuff smaller! And while those are all very related to web performance, they are abstractly related. Actual web performance to users are things...
A Primer on the Different Types of Browser Storage
21.10.2020
In back-end development, storage is a common part of the job. Application data is stored in databases, files in object storage, transient data in caches… there are seemingly endless possibilities for storing any sort of data. But data storage isn’t limited only to the back end. The front end (the...
People Problems
16.10.2020
Just the other day, Jeremy Keith wrote that problems with performance work isn’t only a matter of optimization and fixing code, but also tackling people problems:
It struck me that there’s a continuum of performance challenges. On one end of the continuum, you’ve got technical issues. These can...
Grayscale Adds $1 Billion to Crypto Products in Q3, Sees ‘Unprecedented Demand’ for Bitcoin Cash
15.10.2020
Grayscale Investments has announced a record quarterly performance, raking in $1.05 billion in investments, mostly from institutional investors. The company also sees “unprecedented demand” for bitcoin cash. Record Quarter, Over $1 Billion Added Grayscale Investments released...
Thinking About Power Usage and Websites
22.9.2020
Gerry McGovern asked if I had any insight into energy consumption and websites. He has a book, after all, about the digital costs on the planet. He was wondering about the specifics of web tech, like…
If you do this in HTML it will consume 3× energy but if you do it in JavaScript it will...
Vital Web Performance
21.9.2020
I hate slow websites. They are annoying to use and frustrating to work on. But what does it mean to be “slow”? It used to be waiting for document load. Then waiting for page ready. But with so many asynchronous patterns in use today, how do we even define what “slow” is? The W3C has […]
The...
Enforcing performance budgets with webpack
18.9.2020
As you probably know, a single monolithic JavaScript bundle — once a best practice — is no longer the way to go for modern web applications. Research has shown that larger bundles increase memory usage and CPU costs, especially on mid-range and low-end mobile devices.
webpack has a lot of features...
Optimizing CSS for faster page loads
18.9.2020
A straightforward post with some perf data from Tomas Pustelnik. It’s a good reminder that CSS is a crucial part of thinking web performance, and for a huge reason:
Any time [the browser] encounters any external resource (CSS, JS, images, etc.) it will assign it a download priority...
content-visibility: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance
14.9.2020
Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin:
[…] you can use another CSS property called content-visibility to apply the needed containment automatically. content-visibility ensures that you get the largest performance gains the browser can provide with minimal effort from you as...