Field Notes
Writing on web performance, interface design and how small teams ship.
Topics
- Engineering culture
- Accessibility
- Typography
- Caching and CDNs
- Interface design
- Web performance
Latest
Documentation people actually read
Most internal docs are written once and trusted never. A few habits keep them short, current and useful.
Measuring your CDN hit ratio honestly
A 95 percent hit ratio can hide a site where every page view still waits on the origin.
In defense of the humble loading state
Spinners, skeletons and progress bars each say something different about the wait. Choose the one that tells the truth.
Query budgets for server-rendered pages
A page that runs forty queries is slow even when every query is fast. Count them.
Navigation patterns on mobile
The hamburger menu hides everything. Sometimes that is right, and often it is not.
Should you ship on Fridays?
The rule against Friday deploys is really a statement about how much you trust your pipeline.