This is our collection of must-read articles for the weekend. There’s something about Facebook, Dart, CSS preprocessors, HTTP/2.0, and more.
Every week we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, web performance, webops, security, and other geeky topics.
This week’s suggested reading
Facebook has 220 billion of your photos to put on ice
Facebook users love sharing photos, and the demands of that appetite are gargantuan. Infrastructure engineering VP Jay Parikh lifted the lid on Facebook’s seven-petabytes-per-month photo upload task, during GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference.
It’s code, but not as we know it: infrastructure as code
A presentation by Patrick Deboix at JAX London 2012.
HTTP/2.0 is good news for CDNs and FEO
In case you didn’t hear, a new HTTP version is coming to town. There’s a lot of great information about it, including a recent post by Stephen Ludin and a recent presentation by Mark Nottingham. HTTP 2.0 is in its infancy, but much of its charter is to implicitly get rid of various performance problems HTTP/1.1 presents. Techniques like header compression and request multiplexing try to make websites inherently faster, with no extra effort required of the website owners.
The state of open-source monitoring
A presentation by Jason Dixon.
Web performance: when millisecond resolution just isn’t enough
Sometimes measuring time in millisecond resolution just isn’t accurate enough. Together with industry and community leaders, the W3C Web Performance working group has worked to solve this problem by standardizing the High Resolution Time specification. As of this week, this specification has been published as a Proposed Recommendation (PR) and is widely adopted in modern browsers. Take a look at the What Time is it? test drive demo to see how this API works.
Perspective of a preprocessor, about a year in
I’ve been using CSS preprocessors for about a year now. I gave all of them a try. LESS first, then Stylus, then Sass. All on real projects, not just poking around and tinkering with syntax… The following is my perspective on the features of preprocessors and how I feel about them after about a year of use. Instead of just telling you what they do, I’m going to tell you why they matter to me and my workflow.
Today’s digital design paradigm, the “clocked” design paradigm, depends on a rhythmic clock signal. The clock signal breaks time into discrete time steps. The designer knows exactly his intent for all the actions of each time step and can check that all the necessary precursors for the actions of each time step happen in earlier steps. Discrete time steps simplify the design task.
Dart language sharpens with first SDK
The complex web application language Dart has celebrated its first birthday with the first release of the Dart SDK. The Dart development team at Google confirms that it has ploughed through thousands of bug reports and feature requests from the web community to now release a more stable and comprehensive version of Dart.
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