Real life data on how Google indexes javascript-rendered websites today. This has been a controversial subject, and this article by no means settles it entirely, but provides some strong data for what types of dynamic content are well indexable and which are not.

Though to be honest, I think the most important conclusion the author makes might be this one:

If you need your site to perform on search engines other than Google, you will definitely need pre-rendering of some sort.

JAMStack is all that, whole grain low fat, I know you want a piece of that…

No but seriously now, I love what’s going on with the JAMstack and the implications for performance, security, and maintainability.

Not sure what this stack even is? Why should you care? In this interview, Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine talks with Phil Hawksworth from Netlify about what it is all about:

JAMstack is all about a way of deploying and serving websites that don’t rely on an origin server, they don’t rely on requests hitting an active server all the time.

The JS community has some great open-source projects that make data visualization easier, however, there has not been a go-to solution for building real-time backends that can back these charts and make them real-time. With GraphQL, we can get a real-time backend running within seconds and use it to power real-time charts.

Vitaly Friedman, Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder of Smashing Magazine, breaks down the broken state of commercial web conferences saying:

The state of commercial web conferences is utterly broken. What lurks behind the scenes of such events is a widely spread, toxic culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation from their own pockets. This isn’t right, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry.

…the general expectation is that speakers should speak for free as they’ve been given a unique opportunity to speak and that neither flights nor expenses should be covered for the very same reason.

The details of this post from Vitaly go much deeper than what I’ve shared here. I highly recommend taking 22 minutes to read this.

David Mark Clements shares tools, techniques, and tips for making high-performance Node.js servers in this super deep post on Smashing Magazine:

The surging popularity of Node.js has exposed the need for tooling, techniques and thinking suited to the constraints of server-side JavaScript.

When it comes to performance, what works in the browser doesn’t necessarily suit Node.js. So, how do we make sure a Node.js implementation is fast and fit for purpose? Let’s walk through a hands-on example.

Rachel Andrew:

An increasingly common question — now that people are using CSS Grid Layout in production — seems to be “What are the best practices?” The short answer to this question is to use the layout method as defined in the specification. The particular parts of the spec you choose to use, and indeed how you combine Grid with other layout methods such as Flexbox, is down to what works for the patterns you are trying to build and how you and your team want to work.

Amazingly educational article. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when you want to learn about CSS Grid, Rachel Andrew is the source.

I was clueless about this until I saw the Smashing Mag headline in my feedbin:

Europe’s imminent privacy overhaul means that we all have to become more diligent about what data we collect, how we collect it, and what we do with it.

Read through and be aware of the implications. These changes become enforceable in May of 2018.

What some people don’t not know is that you can incorporate Vue into your project the same way that you would incorporate jQuery, no build step necessary. You don’t have to rewrite the HTML in JavaScript, you don’t have to use webpack, and you don’t have to set up a giant system.

In this post Sarah Drasner covers common jQuery use cases and how to switch them over to Vue, and why you’d even want to.

This article isn’t a how-to, per se. It’s more like a research report written after attempting to build such an app for the first time. There’s nothing wrong with that, though, and this write-up is super useful if you’re about to tackle a similar problem space.

Open source libraries are tried, facial recognition services are evaluated, and their takeaways are solid, if not a bit disappointing.

As you can see, the really simple idea of using facial recognition functionality was not that simple to implement.

The entire piece is worth a read.

Dustin Driver with a nice, in-depth writeup on using Firefox’s excellent debugger.html.

For more on that project (and to hear the excellent backstory), go back and listen to The Changelog #247 with Jason Laster.