If you want to be a good software developer you have to be constantly learning. One of the best ways to learn is through listening to good podcasts.
Here is a list of some of the best podcasts new software developers can learn from.
Articles
NoSQL data sets arose in the latter part of the 2000s as the expense of storage drastically diminished. The days of expecting to create a complicated, hard to-oversee data model to avoid data replication were long gone and the primary expense of programming and development was now focused on the developers themselves, and hence NoSQL databases were brought into the picture to enhance their productivity.
As storage costs quickly diminished, the measure of data that applications expected to store increased, and the query expanded as well. This data was received in all shapes and sizes — organized, semi-organized, and polymorphic — and characterizing the schema ahead of time turned out to be almost incomprehensible. NoSQL databases permitted the developers to store colossal measures of unstructured data, providing them with a ton of flexibility.
1, 2, 3 – That’s exactly how long it takes you to start losing visitors if you have a slow-loading website.
Hold on! Surely, the only thing that matters to users is that your website works flawlessly and looks great… right? Wrong!
The fact of the matter is that we’ve all become accustomed to instant access to information and content. The average internet user today places a lot of value on speed, and the bar is continually being raised.
If you are like most people, you probably feel an immediate sense of dread at the thought of optimizing your website. Where do you start? How can you make the most impactful improvements? What makes your website slow in the first place?
Have no fear, as we’ll be answering all of your questions below as well as putting you on your way to a website that loads with blazing speed.
Why Should You Be Worried About A Slow-Loading Website?
Good question!
As many as 53% of visitors abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Even worse, 1 in 3 shoppers will leave a website if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load.
So, performance plays a huge role in the user experience of your website and whether your visitors will stay on your website or be converted into customers.
For some time, Google has been keenly aware of this fact. As a search engine, Google knows that it’s counterproductive to recommend content to users if they won’t stick around to consume it.
That’s why they’ve continually been increasing the role performance plays when ranking websites for their SERPs (search engine results pages).
In recent years, Google has introduced core web vitals. These are metrics they hope will help quantify how performance affects the user experience. In general, they measure how fast, stable, and interactive a page is while loading. This will be more important than ever after Google announced its Page Experience update, which started its global rollout in June 2021.
As you may know, ranking highly for Google is vital for your website’s visibility. For one, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, of which Google has a 92.7% market share. Even if you manage to land on the coveted first page of Google, the first five results get over 70% of all clicks (28% to the first result alone).
So, to recap why a fast loading website is so desirable:
- It directly affects your ability to keep, satisfy, and even convert visitors to your website.
- It impacts your search engine rankings which impacts your “findability” and organic traffic.
8 Reasons Your Site Is Slow + How to Fix Them
O.K., so now that we’re all on the same page regarding the importance of your website performance, let’s look at common issues slowing down your website + how to fix them.
1. You’re Using A Sub-Par Hosting Service
As the party responsible for making your website available to the outside world, your hosting service can be a make-or-break factor. Not only should you pick a host that has a good track record when it comes to uptime a performance, but also one that’s suitable according to your needs.
Even if you take all the steps below to optimize your website’s performance, it may still load slowly if traffic to your website is overwhelming your available bandwidth or your host’s server capacity. If that happens, some users may experience extremely slow loading times, broken features, or even complete unavailability.
For most personal, blog, or local/small business sites, a respectable hosting provider like Bluehost or GoDaddy should be good enough. However, if you plan on running any type of large-scale, high-traffic webstore, business portal, or other type of website, you’ll want premium hosting, such as WPEngine (for WordPress), VPS hosting, or even a dedicated server.
2. You’re Not Optimizing Your Media Assets
As you probably know, media like images and videos take up significantly more space than most other types of content, such as text, code, stylesheets, or other static files. Even a single image has the potential of consisting of more data than dozens of website pages containing nothing but the underlying HTML and text.
In a Speed Essentials presentation, the Google team identified images as the largest contributor to page weight. In fact, they have the potential to consume a website’s entire performance budget if left unoptimized. Images can also directly impact all three of Google’s core web vitals – key metrics Google uses to measure the performance of a website.
However, the use of images and video is likely to continue growing, heightening the importance of finding a sustainable solution. According to HTTPArchive, images have increased by 19.3% on desktop and 42.7% on mobile.
For now and the foreseeable future, optimizing your images carries the greatest potential for improving performance.
The problem is that optimizing image assets requires multiple steps. Most importantly:
- Using the appropriate next-gen formats which can differ depending on the user’s device, OS, or browser.
- Appropriately compressing the size and quality of images to reduce payload without affecting visual quality too badly.
- Using the optimal display size and density based on the accessing device to reduce payloads further.
- Using lazy loading to only load images as needed.
As you can see, manually going through these steps for every single image on your website can be extremely labor-intensive. This is especially true if you consider that you somehow need to create the optimal variants for different users based on what device, OS, or browser they are using.
In-code strategies, like a JS plugin, responsive images, or CSS media queries tend to bloat your code and lead to other performance issues we’ll discuss below.
Luckily, there are plenty of CDN services available designed specifically for providing some degree of automated image optimization. These platforms analyze the context (i.e., a specific mobile device model, OS version, and browser version) of the user trying to load one of your images and try to serve them a version of the image that’s ideally optimized for them.
However, any media optimization platforms still require installing a small JavaScript plugin to dramatically improve the image and video optimization capabilities.
The one exception here is ImageEngine. ImageEngine uses WURFL device-detection to pick up every possible detail of the user’s device. The logic is built into their device-aware edge servers and doesn’t rely on you adding any additional code or markup to your website pages.
So, not only does it reduce your image payloads by up to 80% and serve them via a global CDN, but it doesn’t leave a footprint in your website’s code. As a bonus, it also happens to support the widest range of image/video formats, including animated GIFs, as well as client hints and save-data mode.
3. Render-Blocking JavaScript And CSS Is Delaying Page Loads
JavaScript is the de facto programming language for adding interactivity and advanced features to websites today. Likewise, CSS is the standard for adding styling. Both are critical components for almost any modern website.
However, nothing good comes free, and both may impact the performance of your website, particularly when used carelessly.
The following are some steps you can take to minimize the impact of these assets on your website performance:
- Minify your JavaScript and CSS files.
- Combine a large number of JS/CSS files into fewer files.
- Replace some of your external JS and CSS files with inline JS/CSS. (Don’t overdo this! Inline JS and CSS is only suitable for small code snippets).
- Defer loading JavaScript until after all your content is loaded and use media queries for CSS files.
Because media can have a more significant impact on your page weight, this leads some to believe that adding more JavaScript is the lesser of two evils.
However, depending on whether you already have render-blocking JS, Google might flag this as a completely new issue. Regardless, it will negatively impact your performance score in tools like PageSpeed Insights:
You can avoid it altogether by using an optimization engine like ImageEngine that doesn’t require any JavaScript.
4. You’re Not Using A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a network of servers spread across various regions all over the globe. What it basically does is store a copy of your website on each of these servers. When an internet user visits your site, the CDN automatically serves your website from the nearest server to that user.
What this does is allow your website to load faster, no matter where in the world people are visiting it from. If your website was only hosted on a single server, say somewhere in the U.S., then it could take much longer to load for a visitor located in Asia than one in the U.S.
While they all basically do the same thing, different CDNs are better at handling different types of content. Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai are just some of the most popular general-purpose CDNs around. Image CDNs like ImageEngine are purpose-built to not only serve image and video assets but to also optimize them using compression, formatting, etc.
So, the two main factors to consider are the type of content you want to deliver via the CDN and its global coverage. However, it’s usually possible to use multiple CDNs in tandem to cover different types of content and reach a wider area.
5. There’s Excessive Overhead In Your Database
If you have a website with any type of complexity, you probably have a corresponding database. In fact, all WordPress websites require a database to function.
Over the years, a lot of information moves in and out of the database. Sometimes, the data can get lost along the way or become obsolete. If you don’t regularly spring-clean your database, then this can really start to add up. Not only will it bloat the storage size of your database, but it will start to impact the speed of database queries and requests.
CMS users are especially prone to racking up these kinds of artifacts from plugins and themes that have been installed and removed over the years.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many easy fixes for this issue available. With most hosting providers, you’ll probably need to use phpMyAdmin to manually check and scrub your data. If you have a managed hosting solution, the host’s support team might be able to help you out. In the event that you have a locally installed database, there are some tools you can use, although they’re not 100% effective.
The best way to avoid any issues is to make database maintenance part of your routine and to learn the basics of how databases work.
6. You Have Too Many Plugins Or Themes Installed
For CMS users, plugins or themes offer near-limitless potential to spruce up the design and functionality of their website. However, each plugin or theme comes with additional code and content that add to the overall complexity and size of your website.
If you have a hand-coded website, the same goes for any additional applets or libraries you want to add to your site.
The best way to combat this is to be conscientious when adding any extras to your website. Only install what you really need or want, and make sure to uninstall and properly remove them if you don’t need them anymore.
As mentioned, they might leave various transients or artifacts behind, so you should keep an eye out for them throughout your website files (not just the database) whenever you do some spring cleaning.
7. You Aren’t Utilizing Caching
Caching is often one of the most effective yet ignored techniques for improving website performance. Caching stores your website content in fast-access memory in the user’s browser, allowing it to be loaded near-instantaneously by users. This can include everything from text to stylesheets to images to JavaScript files.
Without caching, a user will need to redownload everything when they navigate to or reload a page — whether or not anything has changed.
However, not properly configuring caching on your website can lead to issues, such as users only loading out-of-date content. Most high-quality caching tools have built-in features that automatically clear the cache when you make changes to a specific website page or content. So, users will only reload content once it has been modified.
Some hosts offer out-of-the-box caching tools with their hosting service. CMS can also usually find plugins for this, such as WPRocket for WordPress.
8. Ads Are Dragging You Down
In the end, ads are just another form of media that increases the overall weight of your website pages. While they are typically small and lightweight, multiple ad placements can really start to add up.
What aggravates the issue is that ads are loaded from external sources. This means they’ll take longer to render, generate more requests, and may mess with how stable your pages load — affecting your core web vitals.
Depending on how important ads are to your revenue stream, you’ll want to carefully consider how many ads you use on your site, where to position them, and when they load. If possible, avoid loading ads at the same time as the rest of your page, especially interstitials.
Conclusion
As you can see, website performance is a multi-faceted subject. Although some may be worse than others, you can’t just address one area and expect your website to suddenly be performant.
However, some general principles apply:
- Keep HTTP requests low by limiting the number of files required for each of your website pages.
- Maintain proper code hygiene and spring clean transients and leftover artifacts.
- Invest in proper hosting infrastructure as well as a CDN for your website.
- Optimize your media assets to significantly bring down payloads without sacrificing engagement.
The final point deserves another shoutout. As we’ve pointed out, finding an optimization solution for your media, particularly images, is probably the best thing you can do to improve your website performance. From purely a performance perspective, there is no service quite as effective as ImageEngine. It’s also the one that requires the least amount of technical expertise and ongoing maintenance.
Regardless, you’ll want to run some tests using tools like PageSpeed Insights so you can gather data on what issues your website is facing. From there, you can prioritize fixes to make your website more competitive.
[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine –]
The post 8 Reasons Your Site Is Slow + How To Fix Them first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Fundamentally Hyperlambda is really just a Turing complete markup language, with some added capabilities resembling features from XSLT and XPath. You could argue Hyperlambda is the programming equivalent of YAML. On the index of « programming level abstractions » if we argue that CISC x86 assembly code is at level 1 (the bottom level) and C# and Java is at level 5, while Python and PHP are at level 10 – Hyperlambda is at level 100+ somewhere.
Of course, the point being, that 95% of the times you need a low level programming construct, Hyperlambda implicitly creates your C# objects and ties these together 100% correctly out of the box. This reduces the cognitive complexity of your resulting app’s code by orders of magnitudes. To illustrate this difference, please have a look at the following code snippet taken from Microsoft’s official documentation for how to correctly create an HTTP request from C#.
For everyone having done multithreading and async programming, it’s fairly obvious that the amount of complexity required to (correctly) implement threading and async increases the cognitive requirements to understand the codebase to sometimes unfathomable amounts. Typically, this results in difficult to track down bugs, and over time what we often refer to as « spaghetti code » or « the big ball of mud ». To put this into context, I’d like to put forth a statement in regards to this.
Everyone who (falsely) believes they understand threading and async, don’t understand threading and async!
DataWeave is a programming language designed for transforming data. It is the primary language of MuleSoft for data transformation and an expression language for components and connectors configuration.
Mulesoft released Dataweave 2.4.0 for Mule Version 4.4. The 2.4.0 version of DataWeave introduced many new features. In this post, we will see one of the newly introduced DataWeave modules.
We know that, in a software project, nothing replaces good documentation. However, it is also necessary to pay attention to how intuitive the written code is. After all, the simpler and more natural the code is, the better its experience for users.
In the simple « programming rule », in which we will forget everything we have to remember, an API that « forces » you to remember is crucial proof of failure.
Since school is back in session, this month’s roundup has a learning focus. In addition to tools, many of the resources include guides, tutorials, and cheat sheets to help make design work easier.
Here’s what’s new for designers this month.
ScrollingMockup.io
ScrollingMockup.io generates high-definition, animated scrolling mockups in minutes. All you have to do is paste your website URL, select from the expanding template gallery, add some music and post. You can create three mockups for free, and then this tool comes with a subscription model. The paid model allows for custom branding for mockups and more.
FilterSS
FilterSS is a curated collection of CSS image filters for use in projects. Upload an image, sort through the list, and then copy the code for the filter you want to use. It’s that easy!
Buttons Generator
Buttons Generator is a fun tool with so many button options in one place. Choose from three-dimensional, gradient, shadow borders, neumorphic, retro, animated, ghost, with arrows, and more all in one place. Click the one you like, and the code is copied right to your clipboard and ready to use in projects.
UI Cheat Sheet: Spacing Friendships
UI Cheat Sheet: Spacing Friendships is a fun – and memorable approach to figuring out spacing. This guide shows how close or far away elements should be based on “friend” circles with a couple of relatable instances. It’s one of the most relatable examples of this concept out there while emphasizing the importance of spacing in design.
PrettyMaps
PrettyMaps is a minimal Python library that allows you to draw customized maps from OpenStreetMap data. This tool can help you take online map design to the next level with cool, unique map visuals. It’s based on osmnx, matplotlib, shapely, and vsketch libraries.
Card.UX/UI
Card.UX/UI is a card-style generator with more than 20 templates and elements to create custom cards. Use the on-screen tools to design it the way you want and then copy the code for easy use.
Couleur.io
Couleur.io is a simple color palette builder tool that lets you pick a starting color and build a scheme around it. One of the best elements of the tool might be the quick preview, which shows your choices using the palette in context and in dark mode. Get it looking the way you want, and then snag the CSS to use in your projects.
CSS Accent-Color
CSS Accent-Color can help you tint elements with one line of CSS. It’s a time-saving trick that allows for greater customization for your brand in website design projects. Plus, it works equally well in dark or light color schemes. It supports checkboxes, radio, range, and progress bars.
Vytal
Vytal shows what traces your browser leaves behind while surfing the web. This scan lets you understand how easy it is to identify and track your browser even while using private mode. In addition, it scans for digital fingerprints, connections, and system info.
Imba
Imba is a programming language for the web that’s made to be fast. It’s packed with time-saving syntax tags and a memorized DOM. Everything compiles to JavaScript, works with Node and npm, and has amazing performance. While the language is still in active development, the community around it is pretty active and growing.
SVG Shape Dividers Creator
SVG Shape Dividers Creator is a tool that allows you to create interesting shapes with SVG so that your colors and backgrounds aren’t always rectangles. You can adjust and side, change the color, axis, and flip or animate it. Then snag the CSS, and you are ready to go.
Image Cropper
Image Cropper is a tool that allows you to crop and rotate images using the flutter plugin. It works for Android and IOS.
Noteli
Noteli is a CLI-based notes application that uses TypeScript, MongoDB, and Auth0. The tool is just out of beta.
Yofte
Yofte is a set of components for Tailwind CSS that help you create great e-commerce stores. The UI Kit is packed with components with clean and colorful designs that are customizable. The code is easy to export and clean. This premium kit comes with a lifetime license or a monthly plan.
UI Deck
UI Deck is a collection of free and premium landing page templates, themes, and UI kits for various projects. This is a premium resource with paid access to all of the tools. It includes access to more than 80 templates.
Star Rating: An SVG Solution
Star Rating: An SVG Solution is a tutorial that solves a common design dilemma: How to create great star rating icons for pages. This code takes you through creating an imageless element that’s resizable, accessible, includes partial stars, and is easy to maintain with CSS. It’s a great solution to a common design need.
Designing Accessible WCAG-Compliant Focus Indicators
Designing Accessible WCAG-Compliant Focus Indicators is another convenient guide/tutorial for an everyday application. Here’s why it is important: “By designing and implementing accessible focus indicators, we can make our products accessible to keyboard users, as well as users of assistive technology that works through a keyboard or emulates keyboard functionality, such as voice control, switch controls, mouth sticks, and head wands, to mention a few.”
Blockchain Grants
Blockchain Grants is a tool for anyone developing blockchain applications and in need of funding. It’s a database of grants from a variety of organizations for different applications. Start looking through this free resource to help secure additional funding for your projects.
Basement Grotesque
Basement Grotesque is a beautiful slab with a great heavy weight and plenty of character. There are 413 characters in the set with plenty of accents, numbers, and variable capitals.
Gadimon
Gadimon is a fun, almost comic book-style layered script. The font package includes a regular and extrude style.
Lagom
Lagom is a sleek and functional serif typeface with 16 styles in the robust family from ultralight to extra bold italic. It’s readable and has a lot of personality.
Striped Campus
Striped Campus fits our back-to-school theme with a fun, scholastic look and feel. The block letters have a thick outline stroke and some fun inline texture.
The post Exciting New Tools for Designers, September 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Introduction
James Gosling, often referred to as « Dr. Java », is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language. He did the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. Our DevRel, Grigory Petrov, had the opportunity to interview James, and we have included the entire transcript below. Hope you enjoy it!
The Interview
Grigory: As software developers and software consultants, we’re trying to organize a community in Russia: Python, Ruby, Java, and Go communities. And we want to help our fellow developers by conducting interviews that highlight essential questions for our industry. I think that your experience and your work on Java can help developers to become better. So let’s try to help them!
In a previous post I wrote about the uncompromising artistry of Stanley Kubrick, who produced film classics at the cost of wildly unpredictable schedules and budgets. You can reach for similar brilliance in programming, but you had better do it on your own time or with a generous CFO. There is a different, more workable, and healthier attitude towards our craft. Just keep at it, enjoy it, and don’t worry about making a dent in the universe. I’m reading Woody Allen’s autobiography over the holidays, so indulge me to draw another cinematic parallel with this veteran New York writer/director. Don’t worry, it will also be about coding.
Woody Allen is one of the most consistently prolific cinematographers in the business. He has written and directed over fifty films over an equal number of years, almost like clockwork. At 85 he has no intention of stopping. He doesn’t approach his oeuvre as a project with a culmination. His business is about keeping busy. He is in it for the long run, if only to act as an antidote to the unavoidable spectre of death and oblivion. But let’s not get into his glum outlook on the meaning of life.
