Blog posts

Client-side JavaScript (computing things in the web browser) is getting pretty darn awesome for creating apps out of web pages. You can do almost anything in the browser nowadays, such as video conferencing, 3D modeling, local file editing, even hardware I/O interaction, and much more. But since your website is not an app, you really do not need or want to execute tons of JavaScript when your page loads. Why? Because the page is just content, at least when it initially loads.

I don’t like executing code on the client, i.e. in the user’s browser. I think it’s disrespectful, wasteful, and worst of all (for your business), results in lowered performance. I recently wrote about it on this very blog. But as many have pointed out, sometimes you need dynamic functionality on your site. Or maybe you need some logging / analytics. In any case, I absolutely agree that there are some very good reasons to change or react to every individual request (i.

Functional programming is awesome. It makes code easy to reason about and easy to test. It promotes the use of good code structuring. Unfortunately for web developers, JavaScript is not functional. The pipeline operator proposal would bring a little bit of functionality, but it is far from here. Enter Promises There is one very well supported language feature that can behave like a pipeline: Promises. Just pass in a value and chain some functions.

We made everything too complicated. We do this, us developers. It’s fun to invent a new and better way to do things. And to use all the “new things”. But I think this is the time to stop and think about what we are doing. One of those things is treating every website like an app - although most sites are nothing of the sort. The web was designed for documents The World Wide Web (www) was designed to be a collection of documents that could be linked together.

Elasticsearch is awesome. I had it on my “things to learn” list for quite a while, and I finally got to it when an ecommerce site I’m working on needed some real user monitoring (RUM) to make sure performance stays superb. This is the story of how easy this was to set up with Elasticsearch and Kibana (ELK - or at least EK). Web vitals is a term for some new metrics surrounding site usability.