How and why the leap second affected Cloudflare DNS

At midnight UTC on New Year’s Day, deep inside Cloudflare’s custom RRDNS software, a number went negative when it should always have been, at worst, zero. A little later this negative value caused RRDNS to panic. This panic was caught using the recover feature of the Go language. The net effect was that some DNS …

A billion dollar gift for Twitter

Anil Dash was asked by Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter in case that name doesn’t ring a bell) if they could have a talk to spewing some ideas on fixing Twitter. Anil declined the talk. Instead, he wrote an article on Medium. Jack: I’ll give you this one for free, just because I still have …

10 things I learned making the fastest site in the world

Great writeup by David Gilbertson on creating this super fast loading website. Try not to make a slow site Do mobile first. Like, really do it. Be a benchmark hussy Client Side Rendering is expensive Don’t server-render HTML Inline stuff, probably Preload, then load Reward good behaviour Service workers: like me in high school (cool …

React Native at WalmartLabs

The engineering team at WalmartLabs has been switching their (hybrid) web views to React Native: The data we’ve gathered is promising. It has shown that React Native is indeed a viable solution for mobile applications big and small. In the areas of graphical performance, RAM usage, and CPU, every measure we took was comparable to …

Facebook Live Reactions

Facebook Live Reactions is a Linux script for creating Facebook Live Streams that contains interactive reaction counts. It also includes an interactive shoutout feature that gives live shoutouts to users who typed “shared” into the comment box. The livestreaming itself is handled through ffmpeg; whilst PHP takes care of the counting of all reactions and …

How the Circle Line rogue train was caught with data

Singapore GovTech data scientists share how they identified a rogue train as the cause of the recent MRT Circle Line disruptions: Singapore’s MRT Circle Line was hit by a spate of mysterious disruptions in recent months, causing much confusion and distress to thousands of commuters. From prior investigations by train operator SMRT and the Land …

Why Super Mario Run costs $9.99

Because you’re not nagged with screens like this: Nor screens like this: I’ve been playing Super Mario Run the past few days and haven’t regretted paying $9.99 to get the full version. Yes, that’s above average when compared to other apps, but at least you get a real game in return for it: A game …

Polyfill.io

Interesting service by Polyfill.io. Just include their polyfill.js file and it’ll include a set of polyfills specifically for the browser used: <script src="https://cdn.polyfill.io/v2/polyfill.min.js"></script> Polyfill.io reads the User-Agent header of each request and returns polyfills that are suitable for the requesting browser. This one could come in handy for older projects that have gathered some dust …