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.
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.