The front-end development space is exhausting. It moves too fast, contains too much, and it won’t wait for you to catch up. It’s hard. One thing that makes it eaiser is writing about it all — the problem solving, the tinkering with new technologies, the rubber duck attempts to wrap
Read ItFrequently enough, I find myself needing to copy the SHA of the latest commit in project, and doing it manually was becoming a chore. I’d been getting more comfortable and excited about improving efficiency by rolling custom shell functions (like I wrote about here), and so this felt like a
Read ItThere’s been a lot of discussion around the potential to serve browsers the JavaScript bundles they can support. For example, if a user’s on Internet Explorer, serve a transpiled, polyfilled bundle. If they’re on a modern version of Chrome, deliver the slimmer, non-transpiled version.To accomplish this, the module / nomodule
Read ItI’ve been working on a project involving long-running, resource-intensive batch jobs in Node. At first, when my needs were simpler, I used Heroku to run these jobs. It was great, but eventually, the price: performance ratio offered became a little too unwieldy, and I chose to make a move from Heroku
Read ItWhen I was getting started in web development, I remember how conceptually overwhelming it was to understand the whys, whats, and hows around things like unit testing. And to make it even more difficult, WordPress was the environment in which I spent most of my time — a platform not
Read ItIt’s a well-established truth of the universe that JavaScript’s Array.prototype.map() is one of the best parts of the language, allowing us to write cleaner, simpler code to manipulate array values, instead of using something like forEach().For example, let’s say we want to create a copy of an array with values
Read ItHearken back, for a moment, to what it was like merging objects in 2014. There was no support for the feature in JavaScript runtimes themselves, and it was quite common to find a solution to the problem by wading through StackOverflow to find something like this: function merge(obj1, obj2) {
Read ItFor quite some time now, I’ve been working with a PHP application that, up until recently, had no clearly-defined coding standards in place. At some point, the decision was made to enforce PSR-2, and to do so at an incremental level. When a file is touched, format to PSR-2.To do
Read ItI’ve often needed to quickly spin up a local instance of MySQL. Docker Compose this makes it stupid easy. Rather than running a long, convoluted docker command, I can configure an image just the way I want it while maintaining the ability to turn it easily turn it on and
Read ItA while back, I wrote about building your own lazy loading functionality into WordPress. In that post, I use a regular expression to add a lazy-load class to image tags that don’t already have any class.It failed. Rather than adding it to images with no preexisting class, it was added
Read ItResource hints (preload, prefetch, prerender, etc.) have breathed some fresh life into the front-end performance game, especially as browsers are coming to support them more & more. For a traditional server-rendered application, a lot of these hints are pretty straightforward in terms of knowing when to implement them. For example,
Read ItA post on CSS Tricks in which I explore why JavaScript’s reduce() method is able to help sequentually resolve a collection of Promise objects.
Read ItIt’s easy to rattle off a bunch of ways you can improve the performance of your website: minify your CSS & JSoptimize your imagescache the crap out of ituse a CDNetc.Those are all important, but there’s also a more modern, less-discussed approach that can almost immediately earn you some serious performance
Read ItIf you’ve spent 20 seconds in WordPress development, you’ve likely worked with, cursed, and fallen in love with the WP_Query class – one of the most useful, commonly used tools in any given WordPress website or application.Aside from being responsible for the main query on any given page or post,
Read ItSqueezing every last drop of performance out of your website on any platform is an always-changing, never-ending, often addictive battle.Among the several tactics you can employ in this fight, leveraging resource hints is a modern approach that can yield some significant ROI – with preloading is a particularly impactful place
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