web performance

Alex Russell's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk on building web experiences that work on slow, flaky networks and low-power devices. It argues developers should focus on the performance of real-world mobile hardware rather than desktop machines.

John McCutchan of Google explains how Dart and the Dart VM expose SIMD instructions to speed up web software. He covers what SIMD is and how it applies to graphics and games.

Maciej Ceglowski's Web Directions 2015 keynote on website bloat, arguing that pages have grown far heavier than their content justifies. This is a re-upload of the original talk.

A one-minute archive video of the 2Advanced Studios v2 website from 2001, a showcase of the elaborate futuristic Flash interfaces the agency was known for.

A Netflix performance engineer presents how Netflix tunes EC2 instances, covering instance type choice, Xen modes, SR-IOV and kernel tuning. The goal is near bare-metal performance in the cloud.

A short side-by-side recording by Jake Archibald of the same animation demo running in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Servo WebRender nightlies on a 60Hz display. It shows the smoothness difference of GPU-based rendering.

Photopea founder Ivan Kutskir talks about developing a free browser-based photo editor, one of the most complex JavaScript programs ever written, and the web technologies behind it.

Dylan Beattie's entertaining NDC talk imagines an alternate history of the web, asking what if different decisions had been made on operating systems, browsers and standards. It blends real history with humor.

LearnCode.academy presents a roadmap of web development technologies to learn in 2016 and 2017, spanning front-end, back-end and DevOps tools.

Andrew Rota of Wayfair argues at React.js Conf 2015 that React and native Web Components complement each other. He shows how they can be combined for complex web applications.

Ilya Grigorik of Google's Make the Web Fast team explains how to build a mobile site that appears on screen within one second. He covers the network and rendering constraints on mobile.

Full-day livestream of the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit at the Internet Archive, with speakers including Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle, Cory Doctorow and Mitchell Baker. It explores the technology and impact of a decentralized web.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2014 talk on writing fast C++, explaining why data structure choice and memory layout matter more than clever algorithms. It covers why standard containers like unordered_map perform poorly on modern CPUs.

Malte Skarupke's C++Now 2018 talk on hash table performance, explaining why std::unordered_map is slow and memory hungry and presenting faster designs, including his bytell hash map.

A Google I/O 2011 talk by Andrew Gerrand and Rob Pike on building and deploying a web application in Go. It argues that Go offers speed, reliability and simplicity together.

Jack Moffitt presents the architecture of Servo, Mozilla's experimental browser engine written in Rust, focusing on parallelism across cores, GPUs and SIMD and the safety properties gained from Rust.

An excerpt from a Bay Area Rust meetup on Servo's WebRender, which renders CSS display lists on the GPU at very high frame rates. It explains the approach and demos rendering at around 500 FPS.

A demo excerpt from a 2016 Bay Area Rust meetup showing Servo's WebRender drawing CSS on the GPU at very high frame rates. It presents the promise of GPU-based browser rendering.

Emery Berger explains why performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern hardware, showing how code layout and alignment can swamp optimization effects. He presents Stabilizer for statistically sound evaluation and Coz, a causal profiler.

Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software gives a GDC 2018 retrospective on surviving as an indie game maker since 1994, from shareware days through Steam. It covers business realities, costs and sustaining a comfortable living without chasing riches.

Brian Peiris demonstrates RiftSketch, a web app where you write JavaScript with Three.js while wearing an Oculus Rift and watch the world around you change live. It runs on Firefox builds with WebVR.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

James Mickens's 2015 Harvard colloquium argues that browsers are bloated and insecure because feature races trump clean interface design. He presents a cleaner, more secure browser architecture (Atlantis) with a much smaller API surface.

Chandler Carruth walks through tuning C++ performance, from writing benchmarks to analyzing results on real CPUs and compilers. It focuses on small-scale problems such as loop kernels, data structures and algorithms, and on keeping compilers from optimizing benchmarks away.

Cliff Click walks through a small performance example on a modern out-of-order CPU. He covers pipelining, ILP, CISC vs RISC, multicore, and why cache misses and the memory subsystem dominate performance.

Troy Hunt argues that even static, non-secret websites need HTTPS, demonstrating attacks such as injected content and China's Great Cannon. It accompanies his blog post of the same name.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen argues that CSS Grid changes web layout, showing how to place content in cells independent of HTML source order and reshape layouts with media queries. It makes the case for using Grid now that browsers support it.

A Mitchell and Webb sketch in which two German soldiers realize their uniforms carry skulls and wonder whether they are the baddies. It is a short comedy bit about people failing to see themselves as the villains.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk on designing hybrid data structures for performance. He covers cache locality, working-set size and allocation overhead, and why standard C++ containers fall short.

A That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which a customer tries to buy a gift for his aunt in a shop that keeps pushing him toward extras.

A six-minute sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look in which a speaker argues you should never drink more than slightly less than two drinks, the mildly intoxicated sweet spot before drunken madness.

A satirical animated dialogue in which a naive developer insists MongoDB is web scale while a database expert mocks him. It parodies the NoSQL versus relational debate.

A short That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch about the perils of working at home, with an adult-humor punchline. It is British TV comedy.

A short sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound, the BBC radio comedy, about a safety measure that works perfectly and so gets no credit for the lack of disasters.

A That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which Stone Age workers are given an orientation about the arrival of bronze. It satirizes change management and resistance to new technology.

A short sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look in which the characters cheerfully propose a drastically callous solution to poverty. It is dark satirical comedy about cold policy logic.

Sasa Juric explains how to parse a language from first principles without regexes, live-coding a simple parser combinator library in Elixir. It was given at WebCamp Zagreb 2019.

Jake Archibald's JSConf.Asia 2018 talk "In the Loop" explains the browser event loop, covering tasks, microtasks, requestAnimationFrame, and how rendering interleaves with JavaScript. It uses visual walkthroughs to show why code runs in surprising orders and why setTimeout fixes are unreliable.

Optiver's Carl Cook explains how to build high-frequency trading systems in C++, where the critical path runs rarely but must be extremely fast. He covers techniques for low and predictable latency, including avoiding main memory and cache misses.