Alex MacArthur

In the midst of JamComments updates, I had the chance to experiment with a number of ways to preload images in JavaScript. Wrote 'em up here: macarthur.me/posts/preloa...

I wrote about DNS resolution from the POV of a browser, and how you can fine-tune the process to squeeze out some performance points. Check it: macarthur.me/posts/dns/

He’s right. This place will continue to lose if it keeps operating like this.

I have learned first-hand that the document.currentScript can be useful. #javascript macarthur.me/posts/curren...

I’ve been spending some dedicated time tinkering w/ iterators, iterables, & generators in #JavaScript. I’m still struggling a bit to find use cases in which it’s materially the best solution. But! I am liking the ergonomics more. Blog post: macarthur.me/posts/genera...

I learned about “forbidden” request headers recently, which can’t be overridden by client-side JavaScript APIs. A subset also give some nice context about a request, like whether it came from someone directly navigating to a page. Useful stuff. Wrote more here: macarthur.me/posts/forbid...

I think we’re over-indexing on the importance of time-to-ship and the AI tooling that minimizes it. Shipping is easier, but committing to iterating on & growing a product is still hard. That’ll probably continue to be the differentiating factor between success & failure.

TIL about “forbidden” request headers. None of these can be set in the browser by JavaScript APIs like fetch() or XMLHttpRequest.

Good post from @macarthur.me on the various ways to break up long tasks. macarthur.me/posts/long-t... I especially like nice summary at the bottom:

Short post about composing template literal types in TypeScript: macarthur.me/posts/templa...

I wrote about using short-lived memoization bound to a single tick of the event loop in JavaScript. queueMicrotask() is awesome. Read: macarthur.me/posts/memoiz...

I blabbed a ton about forced DOM reflows, the event loop, and the browser’s repaint cycle, just to slide open a box with CSS transitions & JavaScript. Look: macarthur.me/posts/box

Comment submissions for JamComments just got a big speed boost because I finally remembered to set Laravel’s QUEUE_CONNECTION to something other than “sync.” 🤦‍♂️

I’ve been learning about content security policies and have reached the following conclusion: They’re valuable even for simple blogs and very easy to set up. You should probably just get one. macarthur.me/posts/csp

My first (personal) M series MacBook is coming this week. I’ve been doing all dev work on a 2015 MBP until now and I’m so ready to enter the future.

Simple demo for embedding JamComments client-side: - ~10 lines of code to configure - no custom styles necessary - ~2.6kb (gzipped) of JavaScript needed to load - ~3.6kb of HTML to load lazily load in after that And none of the grossness other comment tools throw in. jamcomments.com/demo/vanilla

My daughters are starting their first entrepreneurial endeavor. Introducing the Bin Buddies! binbuddies.pro

You can now embed comments on your website entirely client-side. Very similar to how some other services work, but with a waaaaaaaaaay smaller performance penalty and far less grossness. jamcomments.com/docs/integra...

JamComments.com is about to become very CSP-friendly. And as a result, it’ll be very difficult to tell you’re using a third-party service, even by looking through the page source. 🥷

Crazy how we’ve all just forgotten about the fact that there’s a map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

What a friggin week. Never touching a database again.

Small blog post on running a Chrome extension's content scripts in a way that won't cause a review delay: picperf.io/posts/chrome...

Of course.

I’m proud of how PicPerf’s page analyzer is built. It uses Bun, Puppeteer, and Laravel to collect *only* the images that’d be downloaded when a user scrolls down a page on a phone, before running an optimization analysis on each one. Wrote about wiring it up: picperf.io/posts/collec...

Jira tickets: Pagan: “As a user,” Saintly: “As a child of the Living God,”

Found out a few weeks ago that React's `dangerouslySetInnerHTML` prop is more dangerous than I thought — inline event handlers on injected HTML still fire! Easy enough to neutralize, though. A short post about it. #javascript #reactjs macarthur.me/posts/safer-...

macarthur.me/scraps/footp...

I've published a first version of my policy on AI for my website. It's likely shift a bit over time, but I don't see the spirit of it ever changing. macarthur.me/ai

ChatGPT is the 4th most largest referrer to TypeIt’s site right now. Kinda crazy.

Quick demo on using TypeIt and React to create a text streaming animation like ChatGPT: macarthur.me/posts/stream...

macarthur.me/scraps/control

Introduced domain settings for PicPerf.io. To start, you can set a max image width for optimizations. No more worrying about accidentally making your visitors download a hero image 5k pixels wide (more common than you might think!). #webperf

Didn’t know until recently that you could use adjacent parameters as default values in functions & classes in JavaScript. Post about it: macarthur.me/posts/siblin...

macarthur.me/scraps/whirl...

macarthur.me/scraps/being...

It's in your best interest to use animated WebPs instead of GIFs on your website. More words about it: picperf.io/posts/gif-to...

AI-powered moderation in JamComments is a go! Rather than auto-approving everything (risky), or manually doing it yourself (a hassle), set a prompt and an LLM (or a small man in a box - who knows) will handle it. Real easy to set up.

PicPerf’s over here converting 8,000px-wide images to AVIF without whining about it. Such a diligent little workhorse.

Wrote a blog post on native JavaScript decorators for Frontend Masters. Read it! frontendmasters.com/blog/explori...

I've been tinkering with native JavaScript decorators for the past few weeks, and became obsessed with one use case: dependency injection. In all that tinkering, I ended up building a small framework around it. Here’s Power Plant: github.com/alexmacarthu...

Check this out - an IoC container/dependency injection framework using native JavaScript decorators in 25 lines of code.