React Performance Optimization with React.memo()

I know I’ve posted a similar article before but this is a pitfall I commonly see and therefore it can’t be repeated enough. React internally already optimizes the performance quite a bit without having to explicitly optimize for performance. React.memo can help you to optimize the number of renders of your React components even further. …

Rebuilding our tech stack for the new Facebook.com

The Facebook Engineering Team on how they’ve built the new Facebook.com – a version which I’ve been able to try for nearly two months by now. Throughout the process, we anchored our work around two technical mantras: As little as possible, as early as possible. We should deliver only the resources we need, and we …

Stop Using Objects as Hash Maps in JavaScript

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash A map is one of the most frequently used data structures in daily programming. It keeps key-value pairs that can easily be accessed by their keys. In JavaScript, it is quite convenient to just use a plain object for that purpose. But there is a built-in data structure in …

Second-guessing the modern web

An article that’s been making rounds on Twitter today is Second-guessing the modern web: There is a sweet spot of React: in moderately interactive interfaces. Complex forms that require immediate feedback, UIs that need to move around and react instantly. That’s where it excels. But there’s a lot on either side of that sweet spot. …

How are Docker Layers bundled into Docker Images?

It’s impossible to work with docker containers without docker images. In this post I want to talk about what makes docker images possible: the overlay filesystems. Interesting to know how things work behind the scenes. How are docker images built? A look into the Linux overlay file-systems and the OCI specification →

Alternative text for CSS generated content

Great find by Stefan Judis: Today I learned that the content property supports a way to define alternative text for generated content. You can specify the alternative content after a /: .new::before { content: url(./img/star.png) / "New!"; } Here’s how that works with screen readers: .new-item::before { /* "black star" and element content is read …

ESNext: Logical Assignment Operators (||=, ??=, &&=)

Update 2020.07.21: This proposal made it into Stage-4 and will officially be part of ES2021 🥳 A new ECMAScript Proposal that I’m looking forward to is Logical Assignment Operators. In short it combines Logical Operators (||, &&, and ??) with Assignment Expressions (=). // "Or Or Equals" (or, the Mallet operator) a ||= b; // …