web performance

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

Ted Nelson explains the original Xanadu hypertext idea of visible connection, the notion that links between documents should be shown and preserved. He argues that the Web and current document standards lost this concept.

Tom Scott visits Penistone to explain the Scunthorpe problem, showing why naive web and profanity filters block innocent words.

Paul Irish explains how pointerpointer.com works. It uses a hidden canvas of colored Voronoi regions to look up which photo matches the cursor position.

A short FoundMyFitness explainer on the trade-off between growth hormone/IGF-1 and longevity. Higher IGF-1 helps muscle and cognition, while lower levels are linked to longer lifespan and stress resistance.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli analyzes the safety record of the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), looking at the 90-plus deployments over 20 years of Cirrus flying. He asks whether the whole-aircraft parachute has actually saved lives.

Jen Simmons explains the difference between CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid, and when to use each. She makes the case that Grid does not replace Flexbox and most sites use both.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why handling time and timezones in code is so hard, walking through a simple web app that computes how long ago something happened. It covers the quirks of timezones and calendars and ends in an exasperated rant.

An RSA Animate whiteboard adaptation of Dan Pink's talk on what motivates people at work. It argues that beyond simple tasks, autonomy, mastery and purpose drive performance more than money.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Medlife Crisis examines why some elite endurance athletes die in their sleep, covering extremely slow heart rates and the effects of performance-enhancing drugs that thicken blood. It uses cyclist Marco Pantani as an example.

Matt Cutts of Google explains what cloaking is: serving different content to search engine crawlers than to users. He covers why it violates Google's webmaster guidelines.