performance
If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to make it faster?
Why aim small?
The Website Obesity Crisis
A Management Maturity Model for Performance
Reflections on Software Performance
Add Less
Site performance is potentially the most important metric
Website Response Times
Fast Software, the Best Software
Finda
A Plea for Lean Software
Speed is a feature
Performance and people
Why Software is Slow and Shitty
The Taft Test
Page weight matters
An Article by Chris ZachariasMany of us are fortunate to live in high bandwidth regions, but there are still large portions of the world that do not. By keeping your client side code small and lightweight, you can literally open your product up to new markets.
In the Eye of the Beholder
Haven't you noticed?
I remember my mother sitting me down at the age of about five with pencil and paper to draw an acacia tree in the yard while she busied herself with her own sketchbook.
After a while she came over to see my efforts. “Splendid! But haven’t you noticed how the trunk narrows as it rises? And see how the branches flatten out sideways, not like that oleander over there, where they all go up at a steep angle. Now don’t rub that one out, just do another drawing to compare with the first one.”
Wordless questioning
The comparison of forms raises questions and drawing can be employed as a wordless questioning of form; the pencil seeks to extract from the complex whole some limited coherent pattern that our minds and eyes can grasp. The probing pencil is like the dissecting scalpel, seeking to expose relevant structures that may not be immediately obvious and are certainly hidden from the shadowy world of the camera lens.
Outlines
Photography teaches us that the very act of putting a line around the edge of an observed object is an artifice. Such outlines rarely appear in photographs, or, for that matter, in nature, and yet…and yet?
An outline sketch that bears little relationships to the so-called objectivity of a photograph might actually transmit information to another human being more selectively, sometimes even more usefully, than a photograph.
If the brain is unlike a camera in actively seeking outlines, there is the strong implication that “outline drawings” can represent, in themselves, artifacts that may correspond more closely with what the brain seeks than the charts of light-fall that photographs represent.
Agents of thought and experiment
The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment. Photography has a great future, but no matter how much ancillary wizardry photography accumulates, it will not be in competition with “drawing” in the broadest sense of that term. There will always be a role for exploration by the hands, encumbered by no more than a piece of ocher or a stick of charcoal.
Its practical utility is as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore.