Blog
Notes from the build
Long pieces on the web platform, engineering and machine learning. Plus The Wire, short briefs on the news as it lands.
View transitions without a framework
Animating between two states used to mean keeping both in the DOM and choreographing them by hand. The browser will now do the hard part for you, in about six lines.
A prompt is a spec, so write it like one
Prompt engineering has very little to do with magic words. It is the same skill as writing a clear ticket for a capable contractor who will not ask you any questions.
Database indexes, explained with a phone book
Most slow queries are one index away from being fast. The reason people do not add it is that nobody ever explained what the index is actually doing.
The HTML elements nobody uses
Every year we npm install something the browser already has. Six elements and one attribute that replace a library each, with the caveats that stop people finding them.
Running a model in the browser, and when that is a good idea
Transformers.js and WebGPU put real models on the client. The demo is easy; knowing which features belong there is the part worth thinking about.
Pricing a side project
Developers price on what it cost to build. Customers pay for what it saves them. The gap between those two numbers is most of the mistake.
When not to use a model
Half the AI features I have been asked to build should have been a regular expression, a lookup table, or a better form. Here is how to tell before you spend the sprint.
Web performance is a budget, not a sprint
Every performance sprint I have been on made the site fast for about four months. The teams whose sites stayed fast did something different, and it was not technical.