Latest posts
- Perceived performance part 2: load assets asynchronously or on-demand
Category:Web Dev
When I started my arcade.ly side-project, for such it is, I had a variety of motivations. One of them was that I was a bit fed up of all these low-rent Flash versions of classic arcade games that I’d loved as a kid tarnishing my nostalgia with their long load times, pages covered with ads (yes, there are ads on this site, because I want it to pay for itself, but I try to keep things tasteful), and generally sub-par experience.
I even felt pretty smug and superior about the idea of building games with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript that would load instantly, or pretty close to, compared with their bloated Flash equivalents with their interminable loading progress bars. Then, of course, reality came calling, complete with its usual payload of disappointment - something I posted about in a comment on Hacker News. There I identified some fairly obvious reasons why games can take a while to load that go some way beyond “Flash is an awful nineties/noughties horrendo-tech abortion that should be blown into charred corpse fragments with dynamite”:
[Read more] - Perceived performance part 1: what is perceived performance?
Category:Web Dev
I have this talk I first gave late last year called Client-side performance for back-end developers, of which those slides are just the first iteration. A notable topic I haven’t included, is the importance of perceived performance. Yet it’s something I’m very conscious of, and I’ve been working continuously to improve it for arcade.ly. My basic question is always, “How does it feel to use this?” And this is a principle that cuts across the whole site, especially the games. I want it to feel great: I want it to feel slick, fast, responsive on all devices and browsers.
Running across this piece by Brian Jackson (formerly of keycdn) the other day brought the topic of perceived performance back to the forefront of my mind, and reminded me was something I should write about. So in this series of posts I want to cover what perceived performance is, and how I’ve improved it on arcade.ly.
[Read more] - Is that Star Castle in The Expanse on Netflix?
Category:Musings
A few days ago I started watching the excellent new series, The Expanse, on Netflix. They claim it as a Netflix Original, but both IMDB and Wikipedia claim it’s an Alcon Entertainment and Sean Daniel Company production, originally for SyFy, so I don’t know.
Anyway, I don’t want to say too much about it for fear of revealing spoilers. Suffice to say back in the day I was a big fan of series like Cowboy Bebop, Firefly (and, of course, Serenity), and Battlestar Galactica, and The Expanse goes some way toward scratching that itch in a way that hasn’t really happened since BSG ended. If you’re a fan of sci-fi or space opera with a bit of an edge to it I’d highly recommend you check it out.
[Read more] - How good is Cloudflare's Always Online™ technology?
Category:DevOps
If your site goes down, exactly how good is Cloudflare’s Always Online™ technology at bailing you out?
Rather good. But…
[Read more] - How to run a Node.js app as a service on Ubuntu
Category:DevOps
One of the things I’ve needed to do with arcade.ly for a while is start running node as a service.
It’s easy enough to run background tasks directly from bash with a command like:
[Read more]