Reading List #5

With the end of the year approaching fast, this week was mostly packed with organizing everything for christmas and our holidays, finishing some last client work and a lot of admin stuff like sending out invoices and filing taxes.

Plus: we finally ordered new MacBook Pros which should arrive in January, and which I very much look forward to โ€“ as you can imagine!


Frontend Development

๐Ÿš€ Have Core Web Vitals made the web faster?

Barry Pollard (one of the maintainers of the HTTP Archive) is having a look at whether Core Web Vitals have actually made the web faster since their rollout as a ranking signal in Google Search in May 2021. As with most things, the short answer is: it depends, and it’s not as easy to measure as you would expect, especially since the measurements themselves are changing. If you’re interested in Web Performance in any way (which you should), this article is worth a read.

Web Performance Calender โ€“ Have Core Web Vitals made the web faster?

โœจ Case studies on the impact of web performance optimization

This one was linked by Barry Pollard in the article about Web Vitals above, but it deserves a special mention. It’s a huge collection of case studies and experiments that demonstrate the effect web performance can have. If you ever need to convince someone of the importance of performance, this site should be in your bookmarks.

WPO Stats

โ™ฟ๏ธ Accessibility Myths

A collection of the most common misconceptions around accessibility. Another one for the bookmarks, if you need to convince someone.

a11y myths โ€“ debunked


Other

๐Ÿค– Machine Learning

This series of very pretty visualizations make it pretty easy to understand the basic concepts of machine learning. Part 1 explains what a decision tree is and how they can be used to group data points into the right buckets. In part 2 they look into how this model can be tuned to make it more accurate and the trade-offs between bias and variance. Worth a read if you want to know how machine learning works under the hood.

R2D3 โ€“ A visual introduction to machine learning โ€“ Part 1 (A Decision Tree)
R2D3 โ€“ A visual introduction to machine learning: Part 2 (Bias and Variance)

โ„๏ธ Snowflakes

Suitable for the season, this video tries to answer the question: How do Snowflakes work? Well, Dr Ken Libbrecht actually grows snowflakes under lab conditions to study them. He’s possibly the world expert on snowflakes and even was the “snowflake consultant” for the movie Frozen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao2Jfm35XeE

๐ŸŒ‚ Very Peri

PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri is the color of the year 2022

Pantone โ€“ Color of the Year 2022


Let’s call this year a wrap.

I’ll be up in the mountains for a week now, so no reading list next week.
I hope you have a happy holiday โ€“ see you next year!

Made with โค๏ธ in Switzerland