If you use the browser development tools, you've likely seen the request timing information on the Network tab. It shows how long it takes for web pages and their components to load. But did you know that servers can also send their own timing information? They can do this with a header named Server-Timing. Modern browsers can show the server timing data next to the client timing data on the Network tab. This can help developers find and fix server-side performance issues such as N+1 queries. You can read more about the Server-Timing header's specification in the W3 working draft, or on Mozilla’s documentation site
When you build a developer center or developer portal, you’ve got tough customers. They’re developers, after all. They either know precisely what they want, in which case they will demand that you deliver exactly what you advertise. Or they don’t know what they want at all, in which case you have to educate them in the most painless way possible, and make onboarding easy and fun.
So stated Lauren LoPrete at Figma’s short and sweet Schema conference last Wednesday. With a grab-bag of the most interesting talks from New York, London, and Tokyo over the past few weeks, speakers shared their experience with design systems from the perspective of individual contributors all the way up to senior leadership, wrapping up with a live speaker Q&A at the end.
You may have heard: don’t send your kids to art school, because the AIs have taken over the creative professions. No sooner had MidJourney and DALL-E made the news, than we started to hear about Google and Facebook’s entrants in not only image generation, but full-motion video and audio. The news is coming faster than career counselors can keep up.
A Lift and Shift (according to Techopedia) is “a particular technique in software migration where an application or code base is taken out of one environment and placed in another environment, without significant underlying design change.” It often happens when a big company buys a little company, and wants to rehost or replatform the little company’s application. Or it happens in any company when they want to change platforms or move an application to the cloud.
Just a few weeks after Smashingconf, I attended Queer Design Club’s first annual summit. Since its founding in 2019, the organization has fostered a growing Slack community, aiming to broaden the conversation around diversity beyond the limited silos of race and gender. With the summit, they brought that community (virtually) together while elevating traditionally underrepresented voices from the design industry. With an eye to last year’s Queer Design Count, speakers looked at both the statistics and their own personal experiences to discuss how we can all help move the design industry forward.
With a rare week of beautiful spring weather, San Francisco welcomed Smashingconf back in early June for the first time since 2019. Carefully biking my way through the chaos of the Warriors NBA championship parade, I soon arrived at the beautiful Fort Mason ready for a long day of design. After catching up with some former co-workers in town from Hong Kong, I settled in for a full-day workshop with Smashing founder Vitaly Friedman. The topic?
Lots of agencies have their own 'branded' version of Discovery. The same Discovery process that works for building Mission Control for SpaceX might not work as well for a game designed to kill time for teens. (Although some parts might be eerily similar!) In our quest to deliver value to users of 'serious' web interfaces, we pull from several different frameworks.