Alex MacArthur's Blog

I just learned that the task of preloading images with JavaScript is surprisingly quirky.

Ever since writing about them, the generator in JavaScript has become my favorite hammer.

I like the satisfaction of finding quick, little wins to maximize the front-end performance of a website.

Every so often, I stumble across a well-established JavaScript API in the browser that I probably should've known about years ago.

I like the "syntactic sugar" JavaScript's seen over the past decade (arrow functions, template literals, destructuring assignment, etc.).

I got to dabble in some content negotiation recently.

It's not hard to bork your site's user experience by letting a long, expensive task hog the main thread.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about using JavaScript and forced reflows to slide open a box with an unknown amount of content (i.e.

When template literal types were announced in TypeScript v4.1, nearly every example you saw used it as simpler way to enforce a choice from a fixed set of options.

I'm always looking for excuses to use queueMicrotask(), a relatively sparsely used function for inserting tasks at the end of the current call stack.

If you're reading this, there's a more-than-zero chance you've used a CSS transition on max-heightto slide open a box.

A few weeks ago, someone emailed to let me know that JamComments wasn’t playing nicely with his Content Security Policy (CSP).

I just wrapped up a Chrome Extension that allows you to convert and download any AVIF or WebP image as a more useful JPEG, PNG, or GIF (it aims to solve one of the greatest pains on the internet).

When I was building PicPerf's page analyzer, I needed to figure out how to identify every image loaded on a particular page.

Last year, I wrote a post about how to execute <script> tags with React's dangerouslySetInnerHTML prop.

Sam Selikoff shared a slick demonstration of a React hook for animating text streamed from an LLM recently.

JavaScript has supported default parameter values since ES2015.

I’ve started to notice my stomach bunch up when I come across #BuildInPublic hashtags, or see people throw around phrases like: “Forget everything else.

While AI has absolutely flooded the digital product space for the past ~year, I've been relatively hesitant about its role within digital products.

Find one of your favorite GIFs on Giphy and download it.

Exploring the Possibilities of Native JavaScript Decorators – Frontend Masters Boost Native support for decorators is inevitable!

Self-hosting the Plausible Analytics Community Edition is appealing for number of reasons, but it isn’t without drawbacks.

Web crawlers and client-side rendered applications (SPAs) have had a weird relationship for a while now.

Control JavaScript Promises from Anywhere Using Promise.withResolvers() – Frontend Masters Boost This method enhances flexibility by allowing promises to be resolved or rejected remotely, simplifying and streamlining asynchronous code.

This site's content lives in a headless instance of Ghost CMS hosted on Fly.io.

I remember when the Astro team first announced Starlight, their documentation framework.

Search engines have long been scarily good at understanding content on the web, but there's still a lot to be gained by making explicitly clear what you're trying to say and whom it's intended to help.

I’ve been observing some of the posting trends on here and it’s clear we could benefit from a few guidelines.

I’ve decided I don’t like the responsive image API in HTML, or at least the idea that we still need it as a performance tool.

Despite not being strictly necessary for every site, sitemaps are still an important piece of a solid SEO game, allowing search engines to crawl & index your website’s content more quickly and thoroughly (especially if your site is large, new, or poorly l…

It’s interesting how language around service architecture changes as patterns fall in & out of favor.

I've been working on PicPerf in some capacity for about a year now, and I'm still really happy with its API for optimizing, reformatting, and caching images: prefix the URLs with https://picperf.io.

If you've installed nerd software on your machine before, you've almost certainly executed a command like this before: curl -sL https://some-domain.com/install.sh | bash If you're anything like me, it took a long time (maybe years) to even ask what that s…

It probably wasn't in your local news, but something non-trivial in web development occurred early this year: Microsoft Edge added support for the AVIF image format.

If you’re using Docker to self-host Plausible Analytics on DigitalOcean or any other virtual machine, you might’ve run into a “502 Bad Gateway” error when attempting to navigate to the administrator dashboard.

Self-hosting Plausible Analytics offers a number of advantages, particularly if you’re keen on owning your data as much as you reasonably can, independent of the constraints any sort of managed plan might offer.

Much of the time, you can get along just fine without thinking a ton about JavaScript's event loop.

I've been using the self-hosted version of Plausible Analytics for a couple of years now, and I've really enjoyed it.

It's hard not to appreciate the elegance of Kotlin's scope functions, which allow you to tap into object and immediately execute a block of code against it.

First off, I hereby declare myself not responsible for you shooting yourself in the foot after reading this.

Whenever people are duking it out over where UI should be rendered (server vs. client), compute cost inevitably comes up.

Even today, it’s still worth looking at your sites with JavaScript disabled.

If you own a software package or library, resist the pressure to eternally “improve” or “make it more flexible” it by adding features.

I stumbled across a pull request in Marc Grabanski's modern-todomvc-vanillajs from some time ago, where I was first introduced to the hidden DOM attribute.

You might’ve used Google’s Lighthouse (also built into its PageSpeed Insights tool) for auditing page performance.

One of my favorite features of TypeScript is discriminated unions, in which a common literal type is used to determine the narrowest possible type of an object.

It's been an interesting couple of weeks debugging a DNS/connectivity issue for PicPerf's [now former] domain, so I'm taking the time to write a few thoughts down before it all goes stale.

In its heyday, I was entranced by the Jamstack – particularly by its promise of performance.

For decades, Jane Ross Tutoring has been serving students by providing tutoring for a wide range of subjects and tests, particularly in the college admissions space.

I've been working on a small application allowing users to upload media to a Cloudflare R2 bucket.