If you've heard anything about HTTP/2 up until now, you'd probably assume that 'switching it on equals free performance', right?
Turns out, that probably isn't the case. Michael Mifsud and his team at 99designs discovered this when they switched to H2 for serving image assets.
Solid read. Don't miss this one.
Zach Leatherman isn't one to gloss over the details, and his latest blog post is no exception. Zach has meticulously described the pros and cons (including the user-experience characteristics) of loading webfonts. I'm certain that everyone who reads this won't think about webfonts the same way again.
Have you ever thought "Wow, the people who write that framework must know so many interesting browser quirks, I wish I could get an insight to that"?
The JavaScriptIssuesStudy repo contains a well maintained list of performance issues from projects like jQuery, Angular, Ember, moment.js and more. You might have to dig around, but theres definitely something here.
When I discovered Ariya Hidayat's excellent article "Using Zopfli to Optimize PNG Images", I thought "ok, that needs to go in perf.email", but then he follows it up with "Shrinking PNG Images with Quantization". Great work Ariya 👍
SERVER
This week I came across Mike Hall's article
about Node Talisman, a streaming template renderer for node. The premise of streaming (hey, let's call it what it is: Chunked encoding), is that you start sending HTML to the client, even though there may be database queries that are still running.
Chunked encoding has been supported in Rails for quite some time already, as well as a bunch of other frameworks and langauges.
Furthermore, it's a part of the HTTP 1.1 specification, so there seems like plenty of reasons to start sending content back to the client as soon as we can.
OPEN SOURCE
Dropbox have released their 'Lepton' compression format — I think their own words sell it best:
We have used Lepton to encode 16 billion images saved to Dropbox, and are rapidly recoding our older images. Lepton has already saved Dropbox multiple petabytes of space.
If you're storing image files, Lepton might be worth a look 🙈