The transcript of a really great—and entertaining—talk on performance by Wilto. I may have laughed out loud at points.
I love a good bookmarklet, and Harry has made a very good bookmarklet indeed.
Drag ct.css to your browser bar and then press it whenever you’re on a site you want to check for optimising what’s in the head element.
A great little mini case-study from Eric—if you’re exporting transparent PNGs from a graphic design tool, double-check the colour-depth settings!
I’d been saving the PNGs with no bit depth restrictions, meaning the color table was holding space for 224 colors. That’s… a lot of colors, roughly 224 of which I wasn’t actually using.
I’ve really come to appreciate that performance isn’t just some property of a tool independent from its functionality or its feature set. Performance — in particular, being notably fast — is a feature in and of its own right, which fundamentally alters how a tool is used and perceived.
This is a fascinating look into how performance has knock-on effects beyond the obvious:
It’s probably fairly intuitive that users prefer faster software, and will have a better experience performing a given task if the tools are faster rather than slower.
What is perhaps less apparent is that having faster tools changes how users use a tool or perform a task.
This observation is particularly salient for web developers:
We have become accustomed to casually giving up factors of two or ten or more with our choices of tools and libraries, without asking if the benefits are worth it.
Harry breaks down cache-control headers into steps that even I can understand. I’ll be using this a reference for sure.
Here’s a clever idea from Harry if you’re willing to play the long game in tracking down redundant CSS—add a transparent background image to the rule block and then sit back and watch your server logs for any sign of that sleeper agent ever getting activated.
If you do find entries for that particular image, you know that, somehow, the legacy feature is potentially still accessible—the number of entries should give you a clue as to how severe the problem might be.
The need for speed on The Session.
A little performance boost for your network-first service worker strategy.
Now you can save audio files for later listening.
Have you got the perfect talk for this event? Let me know!
I gave five answers to Oliver, who’s organising the Pixel Pioneers event in Bristol.