Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

TIL: Iframes and performance

Oh Hello Ana

Last November I attended FFConf where I saw two talks about performance: one from Anna Migas and another one from Harry Roberts. I instantly memorised one particular thing from each of the talks. From Anna's I took a mental note to add font-display: swap; and from Harry's talk I was amazed that the order inside the head tag impacts performance.

While I learned that last November, last week I finally had the to chance to see the impact of making those changes on a client's website. This website's performance wasn't great but it seems like this was a very recent issue. I remember the same website actually having a decent performance a while back so something must have happened recently.

I decided to do the "quick wins" first and collect data to see if things had improved. I inspected Harry's personal website and tried to reproduce the ordering of the tags in the head along with adding the font-display: swap;. I don't know why I was so surprised when I compared the data and saw that it actually helped. However, it still had some strong hickups and when I was reading the suggestions for improvements from the testers I used, I realised that those issues were coming from third-party code.

This third party code was actually an iframe from a social media/media website and it was recently added at the top of the main page.

The window’s onload event doesn’t fire until all its iframes, and all the resources in these iframes, have fully loaded. In Safari and Chrome, setting the iframe’s SRC dynamically via JavaScript avoids this blocking behavior.

—Steve Souders, Using Iframes Sparingly

The above quote comes from a blog post written 10 years ago so I had an extra check to make sure it was still accurate. As a result of this, I also came across an experimental API that I wasn't aware of either.

It actually makes sense? I've never thought about it, come across a situation where the content of the iframe was so heavy, or even come across a project that used third party embeds besides YouTube, surprisingly.

So lesson learned I suppose: I will keep this in mind when working on projects especially when they allow content editors to embed from third parties.

Further reading and/or useful resources:

Overthinking my nostalgia

Oh Hello Ana

The period between 12 and 22, in other words, is the time when you become you. It makes sense, then, that the memories that contribute to this process become uncommonly important throughout the rest of your life. They didn’t just contribute to the development of your self-image; they became part of your self-image—an integral part of your sense of self.

Surely I haven’t been the only one that has come across some memes that mock one’s insistence of only listening to music they used to listen to when they were teenagers?

I have and annoyingly enough, I can relate to them. This is also backed up by some articles that show that I am not the only one. I can almost bet that The Rasmus’s members can pay bills out of me spinning their “Dead Letters” album on Spotify.

It is quite amusing how today, if I am working on something and I need to be focused, I will only listen to the songs that I used to listen to when I was young. All because my brain automatically brings me warm feelings of safety while writing code.

I haven’t been able to brush off the thought that this doesn’t only apply to music. In my case, I think it also applies to certain pieces of clothes that remind me of my tragically unfashionable half emo days, colours and ultimately the Web.

Today’s web development has become the motive of arguments on Twitter with whispers of “back in my day”. I read love letters to the old Web and I also read hints telling “us” to move on.

In the past I’ve spent some time reminiscing about the old Web. However, I couldn’t exactly and gracefully put my nostalgia into words. But it was very similar to listening to the same music album over and over again.

I can argue about how there are concerning things about today’s web development and the centralization of the web but other than that, everything else has been labeled as pure nostalgia. And I wanted to better understand my nostalgia.

My teenage years weren’t amazing but it wasn’t all bad. And whenever I think about them I think about a couple of things only: discovering music and building fan sites. During these years I developed one of my core personality traits: I build websites. It was my only hobby. I would spend hours learning and experimenting without judgement.

My nostalgia comes from the need to feel safe and experiment. I don’t miss not having rounded borders in CSS. The old way of building for the Web wasn’t better. But in reality what happened was that I had all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted, I didn’t have to pay bills, the quality of what I built wouldn’t jeopardise my non existing reputation, I wasn’t judged, I didn’t have deadlines and I had no one to impress but myself.

Maybe, just maybe, it is completely unreasonable to expect people who just joined the developer community to relate to this nostalgia. This is assuming that I’m talking about people who are new to programming (so, didn’t start it as a hobby).

My, so called, developer experience, from over 10 years ago will never ever be the same as someone who just started. And it is absolutely fine that they don’t relate to it, as this isn’t a competition or right or wrong answer. It is just different.

My nostalgia kicks in when I feel inadequate and behind my peers. On the other hand, I also know that I produce good work when I feel safe, rested and respected.

Weirdly, this made me look at my past blog posts a little bit differently and I tried to think about what exactly do I miss about the old web: I suppose that I miss building things for the web without capitalism?

But I can’t just end this ramble there: I would be a hypocrite since I’ve been exchanging code for a salary since 2012.

If building for the Web is one of my core personality traits, when I feel insecure doing it (for example, when I fail a job interview or when I haven’t learned something new immediately) it is almost like my whole self is worthless.

This also sounds like it is the curse of “doing what you love so that you’ll never work a day”.

Aside, as mentioned before, my concerns about today’s web development and the centralization of the web, my nostalgia is my responsibility to deal with. This made me feel slightly uneasy and selfish but it also made me understand much better the last three paragraphs of the article "Letting Go of the Old Web".

Despite this being a strange brain dump, I think I found something useful about this: my feelings are consequences of my core values. If I identify and define these core values, I will always try to find where I can live by them.

January bookmarks

Oh Hello Ana

The longest month of the year is finally over! The days are getting longer and plans are starting to look aligned.

Bookmarks from January

Web development/tech related content

Not exactly web development related

Miscellaneous

Funny or cute or happy or uplifting content etc.

Made me think

Content warning: This section might include tweets that aren't uplifting and happy but rather thoughts that stayed with me.

Bookmarks of the rest of 2019

Oh Hello Ana

My last bookmark post was in July 2019 and that is quite telling of how things didn't go so well last year for me. At the time, I told myself that I would try to do a bookmark post every month and it all came crashing down around that time. It was in September that I think that I officially burned out. So actually, this will not be a very long collection: I wasn't browsing or reading much and I spent a lot of time offline.

Bookmarks from August to December 2019

Web development/tech related content

Not exactly web development related

Miscellaneous

Funny or cute or happy or uplifting content etc.

Made me think

Content warning: This section might include tweets that aren't uplifting and happy but rather thoughts that stayed with me.

Goodbye 2019

Oh Hello Ana

This year sucked with the exception of one moment of it. It was a long and draining year. The year number switch doesn’t magically create a brand new blank year where everything bad goes away. In fact, I’ve been dreading the end of 2019 exactly because the end of the year forces me to reflect on it. And when it is a bad year, it is painful to do it.

I looked back to the blog post that I did one year ago and I’m heartbroken and I feel disappointed in myself. My goals for 2019 were vague but I still feel like I didn’t accomplish anything.

This year I lost and found my cat and the whole experience absolutely destroyed me. One of the reasons why I have a lot of anxiety, it is because I have the need to feel safe. When my cat got lost, as I explain in the blog post, I felt exposed, vulnerable and unsafe. These feelings didn’t disappear once we found the cat and it took me weeks to recover. I was on edge all the time and very sensitive to “potential threats”.

I resumed therapy and with it I lost friendships and had some rude awakenings on some people’s character. Realising you’re a people pleaser all your life and sometimes a doormat is a disappointing realisation. And in my case, start asserting boundaries or stop accepting some behaviours towards me backfired. Some people don’t even know they lost me. I was so heartbroken with how I was treated that I just decided to accept that confrontation would not only not change them but it would cause me even more distress.

Therapy was incredibly painful this year and I also experienced re-traumatisation. I addressed a lot of painful memories that I tried to bury and I thought that talking about them would make me feel better. But the actual result was opening intense wounds that bleed for months.

The majority of my year was spent crying and feeling anger and sadness. The bitterness was overwhelming and all I could think was: “where could I have been if this and that hadn’t happened to me?”. This year I finally understood why people talk a lot about the power of forgiveness. I always saw forgiveness in a light level. I thought it was accepting someone’s apology when they messed up but it isn’t. And my problem is that I haven’t been able to forgive the past and it consumed me all year. This has taken a big physical and mental toll on me and changed a lot of relationships.

Because I am not a robot, I can’t fully separate things: my talks didn’t go that well, I stopped applying to give talks, I stopped writing, I lost count the amount of times I cried at work. I burned out because I wanted to compensate for every bad day I had this year and I was never satisfied.

And then I entered the forbidden loop: the one where I start comparing myself to the other’s perceived success on social media and resent myself for having current personal issues.

In a scenario where I am a bank account, all the things that happened this year where withdrawals from me and very little was being transferred back. And good things did happen to but I felt like I was living in an overdraft.

Speaking of good things:

And finally, the highlight of the year:

I married the most understanding, patient, kind, compassionate and beautiful human. My resilience is what made me survive this year but it would have been much much harder without him by my side supporting me.

Even in the past when things didn’t go well either he was the only person that fully accepted me and gave me room to feel and grow without holding anything against me. Thank you.

I would be lying if I said I don’t have goals for 2020. I do have some but all I want is for my whole self to feel better.

I suppose that making lists with a lot of goals that are for productivity and efficiency instead of happiness are the killers of my creativity and passion. So I will try but I will need to practise a lot of self forgiveness.

To anyone else who may read this: have a healthy 2020.