Alex MacArthur's Blog

Open up the browser's network tab and you'll see a lot of activity.

We've got it real good when it comes to standing up websites these days (especially static ones).

Songwriter City in Nashville, TN specializes in bringing together music’s biggest hitmakers for incredible corporate, private and public events to be remembered.

A few days ago, I came across a tweet semi-lamenting the fact that React doesn't have automatic input binding like Vue or Svelte.

Every so often, I reencounter a web technology I nearly forgot existed.

I've been building an "analyzer" tool for PicPerf.dev (it's not live yet).

There's an abundance of browser tools that help you signal which assets have the highest or least priority when you're loading them for a page.

This is one of those posts largely written for later reference by my future self.

I've been dogfooding JamComments as I iterate on it, and as a part of that effort, I've committed to blogging a little more regularly.

For years now, Google and other search engines have made it quite clear that page performance matters in how websites rank in search results.

We use a lot of plain, old objects to store key/value data in JavaScript, and they're great at their job – clear and legible: const person = { firstName: 'Alex', lastName: 'MacArthur', isACommunist: false }; But when you start dealing with larger ent…

When I was writing the Jekyll integration for JamComments, I started reminiscing about some of the features I really like about Ruby (it had been a minute since I wrote much of it).

I just moved this site's content over to a headless Ghost instance.

I've been working on a project that renders a lot canvas elements, each with an image and some shapes painted on it.

JavaScript has a standard for defining an object’s iteration behavior.

Occasionally, you need to mess with a part of the DOM that doesn’t exist… yet.

Cleaning up your code in runtime is a non-negotiable part of building efficient, predictable applications.

I’m rather late to the party, but I recently ran across JavaScript’s Element.matches(), which allows you to check if a given CSS selector matches an element.

This site’s been on Next.js since 2021, and I’ve had very few complaints about it.

I’ve been a vocal opponent of using Disqus for a number of reasons, one of which being what it does to the performance of your website.

I remember when I first started to get a little more serious about blogging.

If you’ve worked with React for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of the infamous useLayoutEffect() hook.

I recently made a pretty big change on my website.

If you haven’t noticed, we’re in a bit of a server-rendered resurgence right now.

Harken back to a time when you needed to execute some code a specific number of times and had some reason to not use a for loop.