Working on Lighthouse, writing about web developer tooling.
Nov 27, 2023: Much has changed since this article was published. I've become far more involved with ZC development; the name of the program is now ZQuest Classic; our website is zquestclassic.com ; and the web version discussed in this article is now hosted at web.zquestclassic.com Mitchfork's winning screenshot from the 2021 Screenshot of the Year contest I ported Zelda Classic (a game engine…
TL;DR: As of v6.0, Lighthouse now uses KiB (=1024 bytes) because it is unambigous. Chrome DevTools moved to kB (=1000 bytes), faster than intended, but maybe for the best ? A KiB (kibibyte, 1024 bytes) is the same as kilobyte (KB, 1024 bytes), unless you mean kilobyte (kB, 1000 bytes). Confused? Read more on wikipedia . On Mac a KB is 1000 bytes. On Windows a KB is 1024 bytes. Where did the kibi…
It's been tough viewing the footage from around the country these past few days. My goal with this page is to be a resource to send folks that may not be very tuned-into social media. Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. ... But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that…
I was saddened to hear of John Conway's passing yesterday. Conway's Game of Life is mathematics at play. A grid of cells, each either alive or bare, paired with a simple rule set that determines when new cells become alive and live cells die off, are all the constructs necessary to create a world of patterns and intrigue. If a bare cell has 3 live neighbors, it becomes alive. If a live cell has 2…
We at Course Hero are announcing the open release of Theia , a framework for building, rendering, and caching React applications. As all in web know, SEO drives growth. And naturally, a page with seemingly no content (from the perspective of an indexing spider) or one with a deferred render is not great for SEO. In recent years, React has become one of the most popular frontend frameworks for high…
Late Feburary of this year, I worked on improving the speed of Course Hero's frontend build process. I noted the impact of each improvement I made. I don't think the results are suprising, but I'd like to share anyways. I'll also show how git can be leveraged to skip build steps when the input files haven't changed - this strategy can help keep build times down in a Monolithic app. First, some…
I was recently introduced to answer set programming (ASP) as a powerful tool for generating procedural content for games . ASP is a programming paradigm that solves combinatoric problems given a set of rules. Users of Prolog will recognize the syntax and logic involved, but for everyone else, oh boy, you got some learnin' to do . In terms of terseness, answer set programming lies somewhere between…
When first starting out building responsive web sites, you may find testing your sites on mobile devices to be cumbersome. The problem lies with Chrome's developer tools (and others like it). It's a simulator, not an actual device, and a pretty poor one at that. You can trust it just as far as you can throw it (which you can't ... because it isn't a physical object ...). So you gotta use an actual…
There are many stories about obsufcated code. Brilliant programmers have created programs that, at first glance (and second...and third...) seem absolutely harmless. [1] But through some trick or another, be it compiler settings or little known language features, these programs deceive even the most meticulous code audits. This is not one of those stories. This code challenge came up during Mo'…