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.
The Right Tools for the Job
Tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to
build better tools.
A representational tension
Do I need to know the precise polygonal geometries of Los Angeles and the University of Southern California to assert that the latter is within the former? No. My mind contains no such precise geometric model of points and lines, yet I know that USC is in Los Angeles. When humans reason with the real world, they focus on its objects, relations, and processes—rather than starting with geometry—because these are the keys to understanding and explaining the real world. Our GIS tools, however, usually do the opposite. Built from the geometry-up around the legacy logic of traditional cartography (geometries and layers), most GIS tools today are restricted by that legacy’s limited ability to model objects, relations, and processes. A representational tension thus exists in GIScience between being a geometric information science versus an ontological, relational, and processual information science.
The teleology of tool-building
The teleology of tool-building suggests that the real value lies in the end use of the tool, rather than in its origins
Urban form and grain
One square mile of different cities' street networks, held at the same scale to compare the urban form and grain.
Software often feels inevitable
Software often feels inevitable because its backstory is often invisible. We click a download link, run an installer, and suddenly have a new tool to use. Yet this conceals years of human decisions, experiences, and constraints shaping software outcomes that are in no way pre-destined.