This Week’s Links

On Layout and Performance

This short and sweet piece explains how you can trigger bad paint performance just by reading the values of certain DOM properties. Basically: any dynamic layout value will, upon being accessed (whether or not it’s modified), trigger a total paint. In my apps, I’ve taken to doing total size calculations in one place, all at once, updated only on window resizes. It’s unpleasant, but it’s worth the performance bump.

Transitional Interfaces

The ease of creating transitions and animations with CSS3 has put animation design and implementation squarely on the table for web developers. In this piece, Pasquale D’Silva makes a stridently pro-animation case, and offers advice on how to do it well. I’m not sure I agree with all of his specific ideas, but the notion that designers should use animations at all â€" and put as much effort into animations as they do into positioning â€" is a point well taken and worth wider discussion. Contributed by Riley Davis

How We Went From Thirty Servers to Two: Go

An impressive case study of changing a Ruby back end to a Go back end. “After we rolled out our Go version, we reduced our server count to two and we really only had two for redundancy. They were barely utilized; it was almost as if nothing was running on them.” Contributed by Kirk Gordon

Log

A neat little library that creates a global function called “log.” It accepts Markdown and some display formatting, including color. It lets you try things like this:

log("*This would be bold*, while _this would be italic_.");

stopBefore.js

A handy little development snippet that lets you wrap certain function calls with a debugger statement in order to jump into dev tools. Particularly useful for built-in calls, like document.getElementById. Does not work with all debuggers. Example:

stopBefore(document, 'getElementById');

The Locust Economy

Interesting piece from Venkatesh Rao that considers companies like Groupon. Rao compares large, distributed value-hunting customers to locusts: solitary grasshoppers that, in the right conditions, become an agressive pack that can eat itself out of existence and destroy whole systems in its wake. The piece includes some interesting thinking on what Rao calls “the Jefffersonian Middle Class” of small business owners who seek self-sufficiency. Rao argues that this group is unlikely to survive under the current locust threat, and is always in some manner of peril.