I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on. So maybe it’s natural that I get a worried pit in my stomach over the current mania to rewrite every Node.js tool in […]

I love the js-framework-benchmark. It’s a true open-source success story – a shared benchmark, with contributions from various JavaScript framework authors, widely cited, and used to push the entire JavaScript ecosystem forward. It’s a rare marvel. That said, the benchmark is so good that it’s sometimes taken as the One True Measure of a web […]

Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a good opportunity to reach across “the great divide” and try to find common ground rather than another opportunity to dunk on each other. Ryan Carniato started the […]

Recently I got an interesting performance bug on emoji-picker-element: I’m on a fedi instance with 19k custom emojis […] and when I open the emoji picker […], the page freezes for like a full second at least and overall performance stutters for a while after that. If you’re not familiar with Mastodon or the Fediverse, […]

Pop quiz: what emoji do you see below? [1] Depending on your browser and operating system, you might see: The flag of Martinique The old flag of Martinique (which kinda looks like the Quebecois flag) The enigmatic initials “MQ” This, frankly, is a mess. And it’s emblematic of how half-heartedly browsers and operating systems have […]

Writing good benchmarks is hard. Even if you grasp the basics of performance timings and measurements, it’s easy to fool yourself: You weren’t measuring what you thought you were measuring. You got the answer you wanted, so you stopped looking. You didn’t clean state between tests, so you were just measuring the cache. You didn’t […]

One question I see a lot about web components is whether this is okay: The answer is: yes. It’s fine. Go ahead and make your connectedCallbacks async. Thanks for reading. What? You want a longer answer? Most people would have tabbed over to Reddit by now, but sure, no problem. The important thing to remember […]

I think filing bugs on browsers is one of the most useful things a web developer can do. When faced with a cross-browser compatibility problem, a lot of us are conditioned to just search for some quick workaround, or to keep cycling through alternatives until something works. And this is definitely what I did earlier […]

A common mistake I see in web components is this: This setupLogic() can be just about anything – subscribing to a store, setting up event listeners, etc. The teardownLogic() is designed to undo those things – unsubscribe from a store, remove event listeners, etc. The problem is that constructor is called once, when the component […]

Compared to previous years, my reading velocity has taken a bit of a nosedive. Blame videogames, maybe: I’ve put more hours into Civilization 6 than I care to admit, and I’m currently battling Moblins and Bokoblins in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I’ve also been trying to re-learn the guitar. I basically stopped playing for […]