A few days ago, I flew to Paris to meet with Prismic and record a few videos on web topics. Today they released the first video where I talked about web performance, mistakes to avoid and tools to use to make your apps faster.

Here are the topics in detail:

• 0:59 Managing performance on a browser, things we do wrong
• 2:35 Improving your performance: image optimization and tooling
• 5:27 Optimizing JavaScript download and execution time
• 8:45 Using CSS instead of JavaScript
• 9:51 Tooling advice for better performance
• 11:58 How can GraphQL help for optimizing queries, download only what you need
• 13:40 Perspective: Opportunities in the new standards of the web with HTTP2, Service workers

Discussed tools:

• Cloudinary
• Imgix
• Squoosh
• Webpack
• Webhint
• Lighthouse
• GraphQL

And in the “things I always wanted to have” camp, I just wrote myself a small bookmarklet that switches from a GitHub repository and its Pages back and forth.

You can get it on its GitHub repo: GitHub Toggle

It is not clever, and for now only works with index.html pages, as I didn’t want to use any storage.

Here’s a GIF showing it in action:

As people complained that I post too many links to follow on Twitter (it is my stream of consciousness – as I find it, I post it), I’m starting to release these link lists every few days now. Hopefully that helps.

• Pure CSS Drawing Essentials – the top 5 CSS properties Diana Smith relies on to produce her incredible pure CSS art
• Pure CSS lettering, a bad and fun idea- this is a terrible idea, but shows how powerful generated content is
• “What’s next for CSS? CSS DB is a super useful resource showing the up and coming CSS ideas and their implementation across browsers.
• Using CSS Grid the right way – don’t like the title, but some good research there.
• A look at CSS hyphenation in 2019 – not quite here.
• The only reason your CSS fails – it’s not the language, it is how we learn it. Or fail to learn it.
• Rachel Andrew on how to deal with aspect ratios in CSS
• Start your project with a remedy for the technical debt of CSS.
• Flexbox Case Studies – Flexbox is nowaday one of the problem solvers you should master to help you in your working daily habits. Follow those little demonstrations and case studies to learn more about CSS Flexbox Layout, step by step, and become a Flexbox Ninja!

A few weeks ago I was asked by IT Career Energizer to be a guest on their show. Yesterday they released the podcast.

You can listen to the podcast and see the extensive notes there.

According to them, my best answers were:

• (3.57) CHRIS – “Being flexible in your time and being flexible to actually work across the world is something that a lot of people still have problems with. IT is not a 9 to 5 job.”
• (9.26) CHRIS – “I’m actually very excited that computers are taking over more and more.”
• (9.54) CHRIS – “We should not be bored by writing software. Computers should actually be good enough to write most of the code for themselves.”
• (13.00) CHRIS – “When you join a new company network inside the company.”
• (16.47) CHRIS – “We are reusing 90% of the time what other people have been doing.”

Over on the Codemotion magazine, they just released the video interviews shot at the Berlin edition last year.

I had quite a lot of questions, spanning from AI and ethics, what machine learning means for our market up to how to learn JavaScript. There are two parts to the interview:

In the first, I am answering these three questions:

1. Microsoft has become this year’s top contributor to Github. What do you think about this?
2. You said AI is as intelligent and good as we want it to be”. Are we moving towards a society in which tech is becoming more intelligent at the expense of the human brain?
3. Could you share some tips to make humans less afraid of AI?

In the second interview we concentrated more on JavaScript:

1. JavaScript is richer and messier year after year. Is it successful because it continues to change and evolve or is it becoming confusing and intimidating?
2. Visual Studio Code has become the editor of choice of many web developers. In less than 3 years it is the #1. How can a good tool or toolchain improve your code and coding skill?
3. AI and user interfaces: we are experiencing the launch of new products based on AI and new interface paradigms, f.e. voice or chat interfaces. How can developers use AI to improve the existing (visual) interfaces