Articles

My articles

Here's some articles that I've written on topics that come up often in discussion.

Progressive Web Applications

There is no single definition of a PWA. The web tradition has always been to offer functionality in a progressive and layered approach. Let's peel back these layers, and see what makes a PWA. 5 September 2022

Sharing state and behaviour in render trees

Two components sitting in a render tree. S-H-A-R-I-N-G. First come values, then comes behaviour. 18 July 2022

The multiverse of frontend development (SydCSS July 2022)

You can't beat the laws of physics, but in the multiverse of software development, you can travel to another universe with a completely different set of laws. You can walk on red, and deliver a 10× improvement to your site in virtually all metrics. 14 July 2022

Auto saving forms in the browser

Web performance conversations are often geared towards how fast content can be delivered from server to client, but writing data back to the server can be important too. 4 July 2022

Optimising webapps for high read density

Nearly all webapps deliver content from server to browser. Users interact with this content to gain whatever value they need. Let's optimise for this. 26 April 2022

TCP Protocols in Web Applications

Reliable data transfer over the internet happen over TCP. But as application developers, this layer of communication is often abstracted away. Let's remind ourselves of it, and understand its performance implications. 16 November 2021

Reinventing the browser with Javascript

Single Page Applications are often bloated with code that essentially reinvents the browser. Let's investigate these duplicate functionality, and consider lightweight alternatives that lean more into the browser. 9 October 2021

Reactive Frontend Patterns

User interfaces are tree structures, with nested components. Describing this is easy, but describing reactive change for highly interactive frontends is hard. 5 September 2021

Design by Numbers

Many good design axioms have mathematical roots, but can good design be born of mathematical relationships? Take a non-designer's approach to designing this very site's styling. 14 July 2021

Building Webapps Without Reinventing The Browser

We're writing more code now than ever, it seems ironic that to add performance we also add code. Shouldn't it be the other way around? 5 July 2021

Other articles

And here's some articles that others have either beaten me to write about, or that I have learnt from and agreed with wholeheartedly. There's no need for me to repeat them, so I'll just point you in that direction.