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CSS transitions and hover animations, an interactive guide

This is a really nice introduction to CSS transitions with interactive demos you can tinker with.

Is my host fast yet?

This is an interesting project to try to rank web hosts by performance:

Real-world server response (Time to First Byte) latencies, as experienced by real-world users navigating the web.

We need more inclusive web performance metrics | Filament Group, Inc.

Good point. When we talk about perceived performance, the perception in question is almost always visual. We should think more inclusively than that.

Time to First Byte: What It Is and Why It Matters by Harry Roberts

Harry takes a deep dive into the performance metric of “time to first byte”, or TTFB if you using initialisms that take as long to say as the thing they’re abbreviating.

This makes a great companion piece to Drew’s article on server timing headers.

How to test vanilla JS performance | Go Make Things

Did you know about console.time() and console.timeEnd()? I did not.

Create Landmark Timing Slides - Notist

This is something I do in my presentations. I have speaker notes scattered throughout the slide deck with the “beats” of the talk—10 minutes, 20 minutes, etc.

If I hit one of those slides and I’m ahead of schedule, I can go on a few more tangents. If I hit one of those slides and I’m behind schedule, I can cut to the chase. Either way, having those decision points spread throughout the talk really helps to keep things smooth.

One thing that can really help in the delivery is knowing if you’re running fast or slow before you crash into the end of your talk. That way you can make adjustments as you go along by glossing over smaller points to speed up or expanding more on your ideas to slow down.

The Cost Of JavaScript In 2018 – Addy Osmani – Medium

Addy takes a deep, deep dive into JavaScript performance on mobile, and publishes his findings on Ev’s blog, including this cra-yay-zy suggestion:

Maybe server-side-rendered HTML would actually be faster. Consider limiting the use of client-side frameworks to pages that absolutely require them.

Prioritizing the Long-Tail of Performance - TimKadlec.com

Focusing on the median or average is the equivalent of walking around with a pair of blinders on. We’re limiting our perspective and, in the process, missing out on so much crucial detail. By definition, when we make improving the median or average our goal, we are focusing on optimizing for only about half of our sessions.

Tim does the numbers…

By honing in on the 90th—or 95th or similar—we ensure those weaknesses don’t get ignored. Our goal is to optimize the performance of our site for the majority of our users—not just a small subset of them.

RAFP: a proposal for performance measurements through requestAnimationFrame - QuirksBlog

Here’s an interesting proposal from ppk: use requestAnimationFrame to gauge how performant a browser in behaving and then enhance accordingly.

Fast Enough - TimKadlec.com

Some sensible thinking from Tim on measuring performance gains.