The Web Huddle #2

Monday, December 5, 2016

The Web Huddle is our monthly roundup of the best links shared in the Black Pixel web team’s Slack channel.

Perceived Performance on Background Images

Even with correct optimizations and best practices, large images may take quite some time to load for users. Load times are even more of an issue on a 3G wireless connections. Harry Roberts of CSS Wizardry recently wrote an article for a trick to improve the perceived performance of large images, such as the ones featured in article mastheads. This technique is simple in execution, but provides a much more enjoyable experience for users instead of just supplying a solid background color as placeholder. Someone then took Roberts’ technique a step further by supplying a PostCSS plugin to do this trick automagically.

Reddit Front-End Engineering Team AMA

Reddit’s front-end engineering team recently took some time to host an AMA which resulted in some excellent questions from the community. Questions ranged from Redux pain points, tips for new programmers, build processes at Reddit, and more. Definitely worth a read if you want insight into how a modern web project is shipped.

React Patterns

If you have a developer on your team who may not have experience with React, React Patterns by Michael Chan could be useful in ramping them up quickly. It features patterns and tips that are perfectly bite sized and opinionated enough to get a developer on the right track. Creating pattern documents like this can be extremely useful for getting an organization’s entire development team on the same page. For example, the Black Pixel team has done this with our Redux Handbook!

19 NodeJS Tips and Observations

I think a lot of us can relate to developer David Gilbertson in that we have worked with Node for quite some time now, yet have barely taken the time to actually read the documentation. David finally made the leap to see what he could find. The outcome was 19 really interesting Node tips and tricks that many folks may not even know of. Who reads the docs anyway?

New Home for Government Open Source

The U.S. government recently unveiled its new open source hub. The site is wonderfully done and mirrors the excellence that the new generation of web professionals in government have been producing. This is an awesome trend that I hope more governments and companies pick up on. Let’s make the open-source world the best it can be!

Best Practices Built Into Webpack

Addy Osmani created some great discussion over the possibility of adding size thresholds to Webpack chunks to encourage faster parse and compile times for your application. This is something often overlooked by developers when hopping over to Webpack. Sure you can make a massive 2mb JavaScript file, but do you know the consequences of that decision? You can read all of the details in the issue on GitHub.

Old but Gold

One talk I like to frequently revisit is the excellent “What the heck is the event loop anyway?” by Philip Roberts. He breaks down the event loop so succinctly that anyone could be an expert on the subject in no time. This is also a fairly easy question to ask potential candidates for your company to see if they have done their research. Did I mention we’re hiring?

Notable Tweets

Eric Schoffstall shows off why he runs the streets in his city:

Dan Abramov challenges developers who may think they know JavaScript:

Jan breaks down the current state of MVC:

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