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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
Performance — You Can Do That With A JavaScript Data Grid? — Smashing Magazine

You Can Do That With A JavaScript Data Grid? — Smashing Magazine

Data grids need to be easy to understand, engaging, responsive, and accessible. They need to perform well and load data fast. However, building a data grid that meets these standards from scratch can take a long time and be a huge undertaking. In this article, you’ll get to see some pretty groundbreaking things you can achieve with modern JavaScript grids. You’ll learn how these data tables solve

ZCZara CooperZara Cooper·July 15, 2021Performance
Databases — A Bashful Button Worth $8 Million

A Bashful Button Worth $8 Million

Most of us grumble when running across a frustrating UX experience online (like not being able to complete a transaction because of a misplaced button). We

CCChris Coyier·July 14, 2021Databases
Security — How WhatsApp enables multi-device capability

How WhatsApp enables multi-device capability

For years, people have been asking us to create a true multi-device experience that allows people to use WhatsApp on other devices without requiring a smartphone connection. Today, we’re announcing the rollout of a limited public beta test for WhatsApp’s updated multi-device capability. With this new capability, you can now use WhatsApp on your phone […]

CWChris Wiltz·July 14, 2021Security
Engineering — Designing Filters That Work: Best Practices and Guidelines — Smashing Magazine

Designing Filters That Work: Best Practices and Guidelines — Smashing Magazine

Too often the filtering experience on the web is broken and frustrating, making it just unnecessarily difficult for customers to get to that shiny comfortable range of relevant results. When designing the next filter, take a look at some of the common issues that you might want to avoid, and hopefully avoid all the frustration that comes from broken and inaccessible implementations.

VFVitaly FriedmanVitaly Friedman·July 14, 2021Engineering
Engineering — Jamstack Community Survey 2021

Jamstack Community Survey 2021

The folks over at Netlify have opened up the Jamstack Community Survey for 2021. More than 3,000 front-enders like yourself took last year's survey, which

GGGeoff GrahamGeoff Graham·July 13, 2021Engineering
Engineering — Shopify-Made Patterns in Our Rails Apps - Shopify

Shopify-Made Patterns in Our Rails Apps - Shopify

At Shopify, we’ve developed our own patterns in order to support our global platform. Before coming here, I've developed multiple Ruby (and Rails) applications at multiple growth stages. Because of that, I quickly came to appreciate some workarounds and automation that were created to support the large codebase of Shopify. If there’s something I appreciate about Ruby on Rails, it’s the principle o

SEShopify Engineering·July 13, 2021Engineering
Design & UX — Managing Focus Transitions in Slack

Managing Focus Transitions in Slack

At Slack, we believe that designing an optimal keyboard experience is key to delivering a best-in-class product for all our customers. However, despite our design system components being individually accessible, we heard from keyboard users that we were still missing focus transitions in their end-to-end user experience. Non-sighted users who relied on a screenreader constantly…

DKDivya Kamath·July 13, 2021Design & UX
Performance — Building A Dynamic Header With Intersection Observer — Smashing Magazine

Building A Dynamic Header With Intersection Observer — Smashing Magazine

Have you ever needed to build a UI where some component on the page needs to respond to elements as they’re scrolled to a certain threshold within the viewport — or perhaps in and out of the viewport itself? In JavaScript, attaching an event listener to constantly fire a callback on scroll can be performance-intensive, and if used unwisely, can make for a sluggish user experience. But there is a b

MBMichelle BarkerMichelle Barker·July 13, 2021Performance
Frontend — How To Migrate From jQuery To Next.js — Smashing Magazine

How To Migrate From jQuery To Next.js — Smashing Magazine

There are many scenarios where we don’t need to follow the architecture that frameworks like React or Next.js impose on us, and that is OK. However, jQuery is a library that contains a lot of code and features that are not needed anymore. In this article, Facundo Giuliani will take a closer look at different approaches and strategies on how you can migrate a web application that uses jQuery framew

FGFacundo GiulianiFacundo Giuliani·July 13, 2021Frontend
Engineering — The UEFA EURO 2020 final as seen online by Cloudflare Radar

The UEFA EURO 2020 final as seen online by Cloudflare Radar

Cloudflare has been publishing statistics about all the teams involved in EURO 2020 and traffic to betting websites, sports newspapers, streaming services and sponsors. Here’s a quick look at some specific highlights from England’s and Italy’s EURO 2020.

JGJohn Graham CummingJohn Graham Cumming·July 12, 2021Engineering
Security — Enforcing encryption at scale

Enforcing encryption at scale

Our infrastructure supports thousands of services that handle billions of requests per second. We’ve previously discussed how we built our service encryption infrastructure to keep these globally distributed services operating securely and performantly. This post discusses the system we designed to enforce encryption policies within our network and shares some of the lessons we learned […] Read Mo

MEMeta Engineering·July 12, 2021Security
Performance — Refactoring CSS: Introduction (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine

Refactoring CSS: Introduction (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine

In this three-part series, Adrian Bece is going to go through the CSS refactor process from the beginning to the end, starting with knowledge on how to approach it and some general pros and cons of refactoring, then moving onto the refactoring strategies themselves and ending with some general best practices on CSS file size and performance. CSS refactoring is not an easy task — it needs to be don

ABAdrian BeceAdrian Bece·July 12, 2021Performance
SRE & Ops — Ribbon filter: Practically smaller than Bloom and Xor

Ribbon filter: Practically smaller than Bloom and Xor

What the research is: The Ribbon filter is a new data structure that is more space-efficient than the popular Bloom filters that are widely used for optimizing data retrieval. One of the ways that Bloom, and now Ribbon, filters solve real engineering problems is by providing smooth configurability unmatched by other filters. Bloom filters work […]

CWChris Wiltz·July 9, 2021SRE & Ops
Design & UX — Making A Strong Case For Accessibility — Smashing Magazine

Making A Strong Case For Accessibility — Smashing Magazine

Accessibility is often overlooked or bolted on to the end of a project from the experiences in Todd’s career in web development and design. The case for accessibility is something we as people who create and build things for the web should be implementing and advocating for from the inception of a project to the release or handoff and beyond.

TLTodd LibbyTodd Libby·July 9, 2021Design & UX
SRE & Ops — Smart(er) Origin Service Level Monitoring

Smart(er) Origin Service Level Monitoring

Today we’re excited to announce Origin Error Rate notifications: a new, sophisticated way to detect and notify you when Cloudflare sees elevated levels of 5xx errors from your origin.

CCloudflare·July 8, 2021SRE & Ops