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The best problem-solving writing in software engineering — databases, performance, security, frontend and distributed systems, in one feed.

11,851 articles
Design & UX — We All Are Ukraine 🇺🇦 — Smashing Magazine

We All Are Ukraine 🇺🇦 — Smashing Magazine

As a design community, we all can’t be silent in these times. We need to be united in our fight against the war, for democracy, for those dreams that children are entitled to have when they are growing up. It’s our obligation to help as much as we can. **We are donating all proceeds** of the “[Interface Design Checklists PDF](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/printed-books/checklist-cards/)” to sup

VFVitaly FriedmanVitaly Friedman·February 28, 2022Design & UX
Performance — A Recipe For A Good Design System — Smashing Magazine

A Recipe For A Good Design System — Smashing Magazine

Maintaining a design system is a lot of work. In this article, we will have a look at what solutions fit inside the umbrella of a Design System, and a few important steps and checkpoints you need to keep an eye on throughout your projects. Here, Atila Fassina shares his lessons learned and how a platform such as Backlight can help put together a series of tools to speed up your architecture setup.

AFAtila FassinaAtila Fassina·February 28, 2022Performance
Frontend — Manuel Matuzovic's CSS Specificity Demo

Manuel Matuzovic's CSS Specificity Demo

If you're looking for a primer on CSS specificity, we've got that. And if you're trying to get ahead of the game, you should be aware of CSS Cascade Layers as

CCChris Coyier·February 25, 2022Frontend
Security — HPKE: Standardizing public-key encryption (finally!)

HPKE: Standardizing public-key encryption (finally!)

HPKE (RFC 9180) was made to be simple, reusable, and future-proof by building upon knowledge from prior PKE schemes and software implementations. This article provides an overview of this new standard, going back to discuss its motivation, design goals, and development process

CCloudflare·February 24, 2022Security
Engineering — Building Confidence in Cryptographic Protocols

Building Confidence in Cryptographic Protocols

This blogpost refers to the efforts to use formal/verification/implementation for post-quantum algorithms to achieve better assurance for them. It also touches on our Cloudflare efforts on this

TJThom, Jonathan HoylandThom, Jonathan Hoyland·February 24, 2022Engineering
Performance — How To Benchmark And Improve Web Vitals With Real User Metrics — Smashing Magazine

How To Benchmark And Improve Web Vitals With Real User Metrics — Smashing Magazine

How would you measure performance? Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet for measuring performance. Different products will have different benchmarks and two apps may perform differently against the same metrics, but still rank quite similarly to our subjective “good” and “bad” verdicts. Web Vitals are the new gold standard in performance due to their direct correlation with the user’s experien

AFAtila FassinaAtila Fassina·February 24, 2022Performance
Engineering — Making protocols post-quantum

Making protocols post-quantum

Post-quantum key exchange and signature algorithms come with different trade-offs that we’re familiar. How do we handle that when updating protocols, is this an opportunity to revisit the status quo?

CCloudflare·February 23, 2022Engineering
Security — BGP security and confirmation biases

BGP security and confirmation biases

On February 1, 2022, a configuration error on one of our routers caused a route leak of up to 2,000 Internet prefixes to one of our Internet transit providers. This leak lasted for 32 seconds and at a later time 7 seconds

CCloudflare·February 23, 2022Security