Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 191 posts.

Web & Frontend
126

The Controversial State of JavaScript Tooling

There have been many different blog posts on the “State of the Web” , problems people face around tooling, and similar-style musings of late. This article is about summarizing my thoughts on recent events. Rather than yet another rant about the state of web development, this piece aims to pour some thought into what…

136

Fixing JSON

I’ve edited a couple of the JSON RFCs, and am working on the design of a fairly complex DSL, so I think I can claim to have dug deeper in the JSON mines than most. We can easily agree on what’s wrong with JSON, and I can’t help wondering if it’d be worth fixing it.

145

Faster DOM

There is a pretty good comment on Hacker News (of all places) by nostrademons explaining why the DOM is not slow . Basically, all the DOM mutation operations are pretty trivial. Inserting and removing nodes, moving them around, setting an attribute, etc. It’s layout that takes a while and layout can be synchronously…