Brucey-kins on how semantic markup like <strong> and <em> is interpreted by screenreaders.
Lovely 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.
Cennydd 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.
I 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.
Removing 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.
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.