Start somewhere

That’s what I think at the moment. This is my first blog entry (it seems to be called story here) and I have no clue how to write one.

Well I guess since I’m here anyway I’ll write something about me for now.
TL;DR Not a very interesting story to read so just skip over it.

I guess I’m a person who doesn’t think much of himself I’d call myself a perfectionist who’s failing to be perfect in every manner and therefore is left raging at everything there is. Well that’s not the whole story and actually I’m a quite happy person and I’d even describe myself as friendly but who am I to judge anyway.

I’m a Linux user and I actually switched to Fedora a couple years ago from another Distribution that I don’t want to mention. (I try not to use too many abbreviations by the way). Well currently the up-to-date version is Fedora 24 and I must say I’m really happy with it. I’m really a fan of systemd, firewalld and stuff like that.

I’m a vim user (neovim to be exact) and I’m having a hard time using all the features it offers. I recently switched from easymotion to sneak for navigation purposes but I fail to use any of that most of the times and still fallback to jk more often than I’d like to.

I’m a programmer dvorak user not for speed or anything just for comfort. In my humbly opinion speed is overrated anyway and I do like all the qwerty users too. But no I didn’t remap any keys for vim. They’re all quite fine I’d say and I did try to remap every single key for vim to make a “better” layout where all the “common” keys are on the home row but it really didn’t work out too well. Remembering commands by the letter on the key is so much easier and doesn’t really feel slower or more painful at all.

I’m a fan of C++ (currently 17) and Rust because they’re just awesome but currently I don’t use them as much as I’d like to. Maybe I can return to some of my projects in which I’d love to use them.

After having a terrible opinion on a lot of programming languages that are considered to be terrible I returned to a more neutral standpoint I’d say so that I can talk even to those people who use such a language as their main language.

I’m a closure compiler fan because I love the way it compiles using advanced optimizations (awesome tree-shaking done there). Based on that when it comes to web I love to use everything that can be used in conjunction with the closure compiler without having to define externs which basically means it won’t do all this awesome tree-shaking but at least work.

Therefore I like building things from scratch. You might call it rebuilding something that already exists but that’s not the case. If it doesn’t compile with the closure compiler it doesn’t exist. Bye bye GreenSock, React and stuff like that. (Note I did actually look in the source to see what it takes to refactor code they wrote to compile properly but they really just did a terrible job in the first place — I’m sorry I might be a little opinionated here)

I hate run-time feature detection but also obviously user agent feature detection. Therefore parts of the closure library appear totally broken to me (like goog.dom) But that’s fine I’m currently happy with incremental-dom.

I care about web performance, noscript support and even a little about support for browsers that no one even uses (IE6). Yeah I know it sounds crazy and currently I don’t care to much but I hope I’m getting there.

In my humbly opinion we should be able to use all these crazy new technologies on older browsers too by using fallbacks and stuff. And yes that’s already possible but I want to be able to do that without having fallbacks delivered to browsers that won’t need them, making it harder to use that technology for the programmer or stuff like that.

ES2015/2016 is quite sweet and they have some great ideas (I read the ES7 language specification) but the main thing is that the closure compiler produces horrible code when using certain features so I only use some.

Other web related things I love: redux, HTTP/2, WebP, FLIF, WebSockets, BrowserChannel, WebRTC, Cassandra, Cordova.

Don’t get me wrong here I’m not purely a web person but I feel like the web nowadays is full of people who’re super exited about all these tools they have to build their stuff and then they’re finished everything is awesome and hype hype. But they still fail a lot on performance even though there’re all these recommendations on how to improve it and they’re like ohh I did that and the rest is economically not feasible therefore we don’t care but I care more than they do. I care about beauty in code. Not only when I write it but I also care on how it feels like when it’s deployed and yes browsers try to fix everything all these stupid web developers who just don’t know better have done so that the user still gets great performance but the beauty is still not there.

About performance I recently build a demonstration page just to check if my ideas about performance work out as I think they would and I did outperform the google home page even though I had three quite large images on my home page and I was even using a custom font but it was visually complete before google was which amazed me because I didn’t expect that. Funny thing is that on repeat view it only took 100ms less than on first view even though I was using appcache so it was really mainly about the render-time. So basically on first view it only took 300ms to be visually complete and for me the google home page takes 500ms to be visually complete just to share my personal results so it might be the case that the google home page is visually complete quicker for you but I really did test this multiple times and I tried to setup a fair game (both sites using TLS1.2, same network throttling, etc.)

Alright so I talked a little bit about a bunch of topics and I might share a more in-depth view of what I talked about in future stories.

Have fun, don’t feel attacked and stay entertained. I’m just learning and not claiming to know everything.