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[techsmarts]

(via The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Inlining CSS)

Luciano Strika has written a short but strong analysis of inlinning selective CSS and JS. His goal was to see if moving some of the more common and up-front-required resources inside the initial .HTML would improve performance.

Goal achieved. While there are still some minor pros and cons that he describes there was a measurable increase in page rendering.

This is something I will be considering soon as an optional enhancement to Gilbert.

[techsmarts]

With the advent of Declarative Shadow DOM (DSD) it is now possible to stream content in a static page that would have otherwised required API calls after the page has loaded. Using this technique will improve the perceived performance of static pages that have dynamic regions.

Consider the following contrived example that implements a socialy home page for our user, Alice.

The page itself has been pre-created using a text file compiler such as Gilbert. Previously, the page would have to load before API calls would go out and fetch content to populate profiles, news, weather, posts, etc. With DSD the server would make the first round of requests while the static page is streaming. Once completely streamed subsequent calls (to poll for news events for example) would be outbound from Alice's browser as normal.

It should noted that this does require some logic so you won't be able to get away with just NGinx, Caddy, S3+CloudFront, etc. But it can be achieved relatively easily with a Cloudflare Worker.

[techsmarts]

Flowery and clickbaity language aside, this article does a great job of summarising the state the web will find itself in if Apple gets away with their PWA-crippling strategy.

(via Home Screen Advantage - Infrequently Noted)

[techsmarts]

This post introduces a new and interesting monetisation model the author calls Frugly.

(via Frugly vs. Freemium)

[techsmarts]

Here's a great little explainer from ByteByteGo illustrating SQL query execution order. I wish I had this years ago when I first started working with RDBMS. That, or if the SQL specs required brackets around ordered ops like many other languages do.

(via EP96: A cheat sheet for system design)

[techsmarts]

ByteByteGo nails another "a picture is worth a thousand words" infographic. This one highlights some key differences between traditional SDLC, DevOps and emerging NoOps.

In a traditional software development, code, build, test, release and monitoring are siloed functions. Each stage works independently and hands over to the next stage.

DevOps, on the other hand, encourages continuous development and collaboration between developers and operations. This shortens the overall life cycle and provides continuous software delivery.

NoOps is a newer concept with the development of serverless computing. Since we can architect the system using FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) and BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service), the cloud service providers can take care of most operations tasks. The developers can focus on feature development and automate operations tasks.

NoOps is a pragmatic and effective methodology for startups or smaller-scale applications, which moves shortens the SDLC even more than DevOps.

(via EP90: How do SQL Joins Work? - ByteByteGo Newsletter)

[techsmarts]

New to SQL and RDBMS concepts? Checkout this ByteByteGo infographic.

(via EP90: How do SQL Joins Work? - ByteByteGo Newsletter)

[techsmarts]

Just dropping this here as another example where JS is not always needed for slick front-end UIs. And certainly no chunky library or NPM module.

(via Popover Menu)

[techsmarts]

James Wang summarises the challenge with startups building in a weekend. While his focus is on AI startups in particular he is echoing what I have been saying for years about app dev in general.

A company can invest significant time in developing a concept through to a polished product. But once it is out there, a small lean team can reverse engineer and deliver a facsimile in a very relatively short time.

If you have a good idea it will be copied and you will have competition.

The solution is have a strong backlog and roadmap of novel features that can be released gradually. Don't deliver everything as soon as possible.

Wait until you see that competition starting to catch up then release a well developed and well tested new feature. Staying one (or several) step(s) ahead is easy if you have planned in advance.

(via Most AI startups are doomed - by James Wang)

[techsmarts]

I love transparent companies that are willing to share their processes so we can all learn. PostHog is one of those companies and they recently talked about their approach to async communication and removing timewasting meetings.

Despite the quick read time, there are a number of gems in this article.

(via How we work asynchronously - by Ian Vanagas)

[techsmarts]

If you have thought about playing with Bruno and haven't done so yet, this talk may tip you over the edge.

PostMan has long been the goto standard for API clients for developers but it has always been awkward to Git manage their collections with the actual code.

Bruno hopes to change that by storing collections, by default, in your local filesystem and not the cloud.

IMO the UI could be greatly improved if they abandoned copying PostMan. But it is a great 1.x start.

https://youtu.be/7bSMFpbcPiY?si=BeUycUVNIQsVZvFq

(via Bruno Talk - IndiaFoss 3.0 Conference - YouTube)

[techsmarts]

In this blog post, Jamie, a self-proclaimed product and design geek from London, makes the argument for designers and developers to work closely.

A no-brainer, right?

But in many organisations there is an ever increasing demand for highly polished and pixel perfect designs before dev starts.

Jamie explains that a leaner start to the design process means development can start sooner, and subsequently designers and developers can work together sooner, to the betterment of the overall product.

[techsmarts]

As a general rule I despise all advertising. Mostly because it is an unimaginative time waster. The copy is juvenile, the audio tracks are noisy and anxiety-driving, the messaging is uncreative. As such I run a network-wide ad blocker to sheild myself from this annoying and intrusive media.

So, when a decent ad comes along, and it is rare, I like to highlight it in the hope other advertisers will wake up.

This ad by Doritos is clever, and if you're in the target demographic you are rewarded for sitting through the ad by being able to download some free software.

We need more of this behaviour, if we are going to be bombarded by ads, at least make the experience less annoying.

(via Doritos devises AI-powered ‘crunch-cancellation’ tech for gamers | Marketing Dive)

[techsmarts]

Each user has their own SQLite file that stores their repo and private account state.

It looks like Bluesky Social is going to manage each user's repo in their own dedicated SQLite database. That's a lot of databases. But not really. It's just a lot of files. It's a very interesting way of dealing with data at scale and I can already think of some usecases to explore with some of my projects.

Pds sqlite refactor by dholms · Pull Request #1705 · bluesky-social/atproto

[techsmarts]

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[techsmarts]

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[techsmarts]

MDN has an introduction to Web Sustainability (Remember SustyWeb from a couple of weeks ago?)

It provides a nice lay-person introduction to sustainable web description and practices. It also includes some links to useful resources such as https://www.webpagetest.org/carbon-control/ and https://www.websitecarbon.com/ for getting a sense of a websites's carbon footprint. I encourage you to try a couple of your favourite websites as well as your own you have developed to see how each compares relatively.

(via Introduction to web sustainability | MDN Blog)