So at first, it looked like about 10% of the BuySellAds scripts were being blocked. But after replacing how we were tracking the blocks with an internal service (just a little Redis counter), it was showing more like 28% of scripts being blocked.
Our experiments showed that Early Flush produced a flat reduction in First Contentful Paint (FCP) of around 100ms on every page tested, including the Airbnb homepage.
A bunch of examples of how text-wrap:balance could be useful.
Could’ve used this just the other day, actually.
Jeremy discussing why performance isn’t just about business, but actually has impact across several broad categories:
Naturally, I agree.
Creativity happens in two stages: first, unbounded imagination; then — more importantly — ruthless editing.
Loads of great advice in this post from Jason on the part of “ideas” that tends to get less attention: editing.
One of the ones that jumped out to me was his note about the importance of underutilizing people’s time:
On top of that, a healthy team is intentionally underutilized. This creates free time for chasing shiny things with low risk. A roadmap with this kind of slack built-in supports exploratory tinkering by defining a clear plan with clear boundaries: I know I need to complete these 5 tasks this week to keep us on track; I finish them by lunchtime Thursday; I now have a day and a half to do whatever I find exciting without hurting the overall strategic goals or slowing things down.
What a healthy (and wise!) counter from the way most organizations tend to operate.a
All of the above are part of the same issue - a task is an incomplete and inaccurate cadence to measure main-thread blocking.
Image transitions are a technique used to animate images as they appear on screen. Examples include scaling or fading the image into view for visual flare. However, often these transitions are implemented in a way that causes a large degradation in performance and thus user experience.
We worked with Case-Mate to fix this issue on their website, resulting in a 6 second improvement in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)! In this case study, we’ll walk through the experience and the steps we went through to make this improvement.
Nice little review of JavaScript site generators by Zach. Couple standouts, to me:
Of the 7 generators tested, only Astro and Eleventy default to 0kb of client-side JavaScript. More 0kb baselines, please.
Three of the generators hide npm audit reports by default. (Basically, the opposite of “secure by default”)
Jeremy writing about Clearleft’s current conclusion around so-called “AI”:
There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs.
I think this sums up the way I’ve been feeling about it so far (though struggling to phrase it as succinctly).
Like most, I’ve played with ChatGPT, Midjourney and similar things, purely out of curiosity, and I’ve paid attention to the example outputs I’m seeing from others. For me, the output continues to fall into that camp of “pretty good for a piece of technology but definitely has a distinct ‘smell’ about it”.
I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I’m thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind.
This. 100x, this.