Back-end:
- Flickr Engineers Do It Offline – on the “new hotness” of queuing systems in web apps. Also: LM Orchard – “Queue Everything And Delight Everyone“
Front-end:
- Steve Souders of Google has released Hammerhead, a nifty Firebug extension for measuring page load times. He is also teaching a class on high performance web sites at Stanford University this year, and posting his class notes online.
- Steve Lamm (also of Google) has some notes on Hammerhead, and the importance of using a proxy to test performance over slow connections.
- The Opera Web Standards Curriculum has recently been updated with a bunch of new articles covering accessibility and CSS. This is a fantastic resource.
- John Resig has a nifty interactive tutorial on advanced JavaScript.
- Christian Heilmann shows how to use Yahoo! Pipes and JavaScript to extract specially tagged tweets from Twitter.
- JSBin is a great way to experiment with and share snippets of HTML and JavaScript code. (Via Ajaxian)
Design & User Experience:
- Victor Lombardi on Concept Design Tools
- Jessica Enders takes an empirical approach to the age-old Zebra-striping question: part 1 and part 2.
- Indi Young: Look At It Another Way. Are you trying to solve the right problem?
Other geekery:
- “Blowing Up” – An interesting article from Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point) about the counter-intuitive investment strategies of Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness). The article is from six years ago; rather relevant right now. (Via Megan McArdle)
- Scott Hanselman talks about his experiences with telepresence tools (videoconferencing, screen sharing) after a year of remote working.
- The eyeballing game. How accurately can you judge angles and distances?
T-shirt of the week: “Biscuit Science“
The cartoon is from a panel in episode 20 of Dresden Codak’s strange and beautiful “Hob” comic. The phrase “I will do science to it” has buried itself in my head, and is not coming out.