web scale

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 talk by Yuri Iozzelli at a WebAssembly meetup on CheerpX, an x86 virtual machine running in the browser. It uses a JIT compiler that emits WebAssembly at runtime to run real native applications. It covers the architecture and demos such as porting a multiplayer C++ game.

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 short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

A short archival capture of the 2001 Flash website of 2Advanced Studios, an agency known for high-end Flash design. It is part of the Web Design Museum's collection of early web design.

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.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

Leptos creator Greg Johnston examines Rust/WebAssembly frontend frameworks against JavaScript frameworks using the JS framework benchmark. He argues that WASM is no longer too slow for DOM-heavy rendering.

A short Techquickie explainer on why laptop webcams are much worse than phone cameras. It covers sensor size, image processing, and the interface differences between laptops and phones, with input from a Logitech engineer.

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.

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.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

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.

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.

A two-minute clip of Steve Jobs at WWDC 2007 introducing the plan for iPhone third-party apps as web apps built on Safari and Ajax. It shows the original vision before the native SDK and App Store.

A cappella parody song by The Richter Scales, set to Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire', lampooning the Web 2.0 startup bubble. It won a Webby for viral video in 2007.

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.

DIY Perks builds a webcam mod using a two-way mirror in a box so the camera sits behind the screen image. This allows real eye contact on video calls.

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.

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

Real Engineering explains the engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope, including its folding mirror, sunshield, orbit and cooling systems, and why deployment was so difficult.

A Google Tech Talk on Yahoo's 14 rules for faster web pages and the YSlow tool. It covers front-end practices like avoiding @import and fixing ETags, with live analysis of popular sites.

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 PyData London 2018 talk on how JPMorgan scaled its Athena Python platform over ten years to about 35 million lines of code and thousands of developers. It covers infrastructure, tooling and culture for analytics and visualization at that scale.

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.

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.

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.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

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.

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.

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

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.

Clay Shirky argues at Web 2.0 Expo NY that the problem online is not information overload but filter failure. He says the real challenge is building better ways to filter and organize what we see.

Hyrum Wright shares lessons from five years of mass code migrations in Google's huge C++ codebase. He covers why to migrate, how hard it really is, and how Google updates core libraries and their users continually.

Rich Harris's Svelte Summit 2020 talk on what a modern web development workflow could look like. It announced that Sapper would give way to what became SvelteKit.