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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • By SPA I mean “single page application” it’s currently the dominant approach and powered in a large part by technologies like react and node. I’m not certain when it started precisely… with technology it’s more a case of “rising to prominence” rather than “first happened” I think it probably really started going around 2014 with HTML5?

    SPAs are still pretty hot but they’ve waned in popularity due to overuse and general complexity. Essentially your website becomes a single page that just swaps out what’s shown to the user as they “navigate” between different parts of the site. When well done this can make a site incredibly responsive, but it’s often quite poorly done and responsiveness can end up blocked by server requests anyways.




  • Nah, a lot of old tech. I used to work on shit like this… loading all your images (including the fucking rounded corners for IE) into a sprite… setting up caching, using prefetching and inlined CSS/JS for critical path stuff.

    There was a whole industry around web performance in the days that a customer might be trying to download your site over their 256 kbps connection.

    It’s neat tech and I miss fiddling with it. I honestly found it a lot more fulfilling than the SPA era of web design.


  • Honestly? Pretty fucking awesome if you get it configured correctly. I don’t think it’s super useful for production (I prefer chef/vagrant) but for dev boxes it’s incredible at producing consistent environments even on different OSes and architectures.

    Anything that makes it less painful for a dev to destroy and rebuild an environment that’s corrupt or even just a bit spooky pays for itself almost immediately.