Read the Tea Leaves | Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson

I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on.
So maybe it’s natural that I get a worried pit in my stomach over the current mania to rewrite every Node.js tool in a “faster” language like Rust, Zig, Go, etc. Don’t get me wrong – these languages are cool! (I’ve got a copy of the Rust book on my desk...

I love the js-framework-benchmark. It’s a true open-source success story – a common benchmark, with contributions from various JavaScript framework authors, widely cited, and used to push the entire JavaScript ecosystem forward. It’s a rare marvel.
That said, the benchmark is so good that it’s sometimes taken as the One True Measure of a web framework’s performance (or maybe even worth!). But like any metric, it has its flaws and limitations. Many of these limitations are well-known among framework...

Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a good opportunity to reach across “the great divide” and try to find common ground rather than...

Recently I got an interesting performance bug on emoji-picker-element:
I’m on a fedi instance with 19k custom emojis […] and when I open the emoji picker […], the page freezes for like a full second at least and overall performance stutters for a while after that....