Making Reasonable Use of Computer Resources

The Main Thread Is Not Yours — Den Odell

Every millisecond you spend executing JavaScript is a millisecond the browser can’t spend responding to a click, updating a scroll position, or acknowledging that the user did just try to type something. When your code runs long, you’re not causing “jank” in some abstract technical sense; you’re ignoring someone who’s trying to talk to you.

This is a great way to think about client-side JavaScript!

Also:

Before your application code runs a single line, your framework has already spent some of the user’s main thread budget on initialization, hydration, and virtual DOM reconciliation.

SpeedCurve | The psychology of site speed and human happiness

Tammy takes a deep dive into our brains to examine the psychology of web performance. It opens with this:

If you don’t consider time a crucial usability factor, you’re missing a fundamental aspect of the user experience.

I wish that more UX designers understood that!

Introducing Opportunities & Experiments: Taking the Guesswork out of Performance - WebPageTest Blog

WebPageTest just got even better! Now you can mimic the results of what would’ve previously required actually shipping, like adding third-party scripts, switching from a client-rendered to a server-rendered architecture and other changes that could potentially have a big effect on performance. Now you can run an experiment to get the results before actual implementation.

Now THAT’S What I Call Service Worker! – A List Apart

This is terrific! Jeremy shows how you can implement a fairly straightforward service worker for performance gains, but then really kicks it up a notch with a recipe for turning a regular website into a speedy single page app without framework bloat.

HTML Over The Wire | Hotwire

This is great! The folks at Basecamp are releasing the front-end frameworks they use to build Hey. There’s Turbo—the successor to Turbolinks:

It offers a simpler alternative to the prevailing client-side frameworks which put all the logic in the front-end and confine the server side of your app to being little more than a JSON API.

With Turbo, you let the server deliver HTML directly, which means all the logic for checking permissions, interacting directly with your domain model, and everything else that goes into programming an application can happen more or less exclusively within your favorite programming language. You’re no longer mirroring logic on both sides of a JSON divide. All the logic lives on the server, and the browser deals just with the final HTML.

Yes, this is basically Hijax (which is itself simply a name for progressive enhancement applied to Ajax) and I’m totally fine with that. I don’t care what it’s called when the end result is faster, more resilient websites.

Compare and contrast the simplicity of the Hotwire/Turbo approach to the knots that React is tying itself up in to try to get the same performance benefits.