Thoughts on web development, open source, software architecture, and the future.
Visit philipwalton.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2013 – Sep 2018
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Google Analytics is a powerful yet quite complicated tool. And unfortunately, the truth is most people who use it don’t reap its full benefits. There’s a lot of excellent and free content out there that explains how to use Google Analytics, but most of it is rather narrowly focused on use cases that primarily apply to…
A few weeks ago I was looking at some of the performance metrics for my site. Specifically, I wanted to see how I was doing on our newest metric, first input delay (FID). My site is just a blog (and doesn’t run much JavaScript), so I expected to see pretty good results.
The problem with z-index is that very few people understand how it really works. It’s not complicated, but it if you’ve never taken the time to read its specification, there are almost certainly crucial aspects that you’re completely unaware of.
Most web developers I talk to these days love writing JavaScript with all the newest language features—async/await, classes, arrow functions, etc. However, despite the fact that all modern browsers can run ES2015+ code and natively support the features I just mentioned, most developers still transpile their code to…
A few weeks ago CSS variables—more accurately known as CSS Custom Properties—shipped in Chrome Canary behind the Experimental Web Platform Features flag.[1] When Chrome engineer Addy Osmani first tweeted about the release, he was met with a surprising amount of negativity, hostility, and skepticism. At least, it was…