Hi everyone,

I'm not so good at this email newsletter thing, am I?! It's been almost three months since my last update! Sorry about that. I went quiet for a while after the book launched, and put my head down, writing furiously. More chapters were written (coming soon to those of you kind enough to buy the pre-release of my Performance Engineering In Practice book) and I ended up with four new blog posts to share too.

Before we get to that, if you want to see/hear me talk about the book, my career history and what it's like to work for Canva, I recently sat down with Dan Neciu for his Señors at Scale podcast. Check that out here: Spotify | Apple | YouTube

Now if you're looking for something decent to read, have a look at these blog posts from late February onwards, some of which you may have missed...

• Constraints and the Lost Art of Optimization went up in February. The original Macintosh shipped its entire operating system, font renderer, window manager, and graphics engine in 64KB of ROM. Super Mario Bros was 40KB, Tetris on Game Boy 32KB. None of these were compromised, they were masterpieces. The kind of the thinking these limitations enforce makes for better products. Some engineers still impose those constraints on themselves even when nobody asks them to.

• You're Looking at the Wrong Pretext Demo was a reaction piece in March. Cheng Lou's new Pretext measurement library went viral on the back of dragons, ASCII smoke, and other canvas demos that look impressive. But the actually important feature, predicting text layout without ever touching the DOM and keeping the accessibility tree intact, went almost unnoticed. The community spent three days building dragons when it should have been building accessible, usable chat interfaces.

• The Design-Minded Engineer came in April. It's the longest piece I've published this year, and the one closest to my heart. It opens with an embarrassing story from earlier in my career: a designer at AKQA in 2002 put a screenshot of my frontend work into Photoshop, laying his original design over it at 50% opacity, and showed me how off I was. The post is about the framework I've been refining ever since: three "lenses" that help you be a design-minded engineer, the missing states, and why design fluency is a skill any engineer can learn rather than a talent some are born with.

• Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently went up last Thursday and has already run away from me. Safari and Firefox both ship domain-specific quirks: literal if site == X checks that change how the browser renders pages on TikTok, Netflix, Instagram, even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn't, because Chrome doesn't need to. The post hit Hacker News, hackaday.com, got picked up across Mastodon and Bluesky, and inspired a new creation: QuirksBot, a bot built by James Stuckey Weber that tracks new additions to the WebKit and Firefox quirks files as they're committed. A genuinely lovely thing to come out of a blog post.

And now I'm going to stick my head down again and get some more chapters written. It's shaping up to be a book I'm really, really proud of, and I can't wait to share the next batch of chapters with you soon!

All the best for now.
Den