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  How To Optimize Your Site With HTTP Caching

I’ve been on a web tweaking kick lately: how to speed up your javascript, gzip files with your server, and now how to set up caching. But the reason is simple: site performance is a feature. For web sites, speed may be feature #1. Users hate waiting, we get frustrated by buffering videos and pages that pop together as images slowly load. It’s a jarring (aka bad) user experience. Time invested in site optimization is well worth it, so let’s dive in. What is Caching? ...

   Website performance,Speed,HTTP Cache,Hash code     2011-12-10 06:11:33

  Programming Language Readability

Lets compare some Python to Haskell for solving the same problem.  The problem we’ll pick is Trie data-structure for auto-completions.  We are interested not so much in the nitty gritty of the algorithm, but in the language style itself.  Auto-complete has been in the programming news a lot recently; both a Python and a Haskell solver have turned up. (I suspect this post got flagged on Hacker News :(  It never got on the front-page despite the rapid upvoting on a n...

   Programming,Readability,Python,Haskell     2012-02-27 04:52:02

  What should video website do besides buying copyright?

Several major video sites in China seem to be designed by the same team, they look the same from the main interface to advertising scheme. The question is whether video sites really do not need to improve their products and user experience in addition to smashing the money to buy the copyright to attract users, is there no other choice? After reading this article, perhaps we can somehow have different views.The Web 2.0 era's video siteIn Web 1.0 era, the main way for users to obtain information...

   Video site, Copyright,User experience     2013-03-06 03:15:39

  Cache Reheating - Not to be Ignored

An important aspect to keep in mind with databases is the cost of cache reheating after a server restart. Consider the following diagram which shows several cache servers (e.g., memcached) in front of a database server.This sort of setup is common and can work quite well when appropriate; it removes read load from the database and allows more RAM to be utilized for scaling (when the database doesn’t scale horizontally). But what happens if all the cache servers restart at the same time, s...

   Database,Cost,Cache reheating,Advice     2011-09-21 09:47:29

  Beauty of code : How to write graceful PHP code

Writing good code is an art. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to develop good programming habits at the beginning. Good programming habits not only contributes to the early project design (modular),but also allows you to the code easier to understand, so that the maintenance of the code is easier. Bad programming habits will result in more code bugs, and will make future maintenance work difficult. We introduce some good programming habits taking PHP as example. Hope this will help you....

   PHP,Good code     2012-08-26 12:23:03

  How One Missing `var` Ruined our Launch

Well, that was a veritable shitstorm (sorry for the language).  Long story short, MelonCard was featured today on TechCrunch (along with other500Startups companies, also on VentureBeat, Forbes, …) and everything broke all at once.  Every. little. thing.  We had rolled out a huge change to MelonCard over the last few days to make our site a seamless “everything just updates” look-good / feel-good product using NodeJS lo...

   JavaScript,NodeJs,jQuery,Variable,Scope,Global     2011-11-02 13:01:22

  Tips and tricks about JavaScript from Google

JavaScript is now a very popular client side language. It's flexible, powerful but easy to make mistakes. So good programming style is better for you to write efficient and readable JavaScript codes. Here are some tips and tricks about JavaScript from Google. True and False Boolean Expressions The following are all false in boolean expressions: null undefined '' the empty string 0 the number But be careful, because these are all true: '0' the string [] the empty array {}&n...

   JavaScript, Google, Coding standard     2013-02-26 23:11:03

  Is Facebook becoming Tencent like?

Recently there is news that Facebook is developing a Reader application which is to compete with Flipboard and Pulse. This reminds me a few movements of Facebook in the past few months. First they built a copy of Snapchat named Poke which failed badly at last. Then they launched a new feature on Instagram named Video on Instagram which allows users to shoot and share short videos up to 15 seconds. This feature is to compete with Vine from Twitter. It seems Instagram wins over Vine on this. You c...

   Facebook,Tencent,Copy     2013-06-24 01:17:27

  Web Design is 95% Typography

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.Information design is typographyBack in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites:Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individ...

   Web,Typography,Font,Resolution     2011-08-19 08:20:05

  Why Javascript is a Joy

I’m probably a bit biased – being a front-end web developer for a few years will do that – but I really enjoy writing Javascript. I’ve recently retreated from pure coding the last few months, but I got an opportunity this past week to jump back into some tasks, and it has reminded me how fun it is to dive into our[1] front-end codebase. Yes, Javascript can be surprisingly elegant yet completely infuriating, and all on the same line of code; for a long time, ...

   JavaScript,Speed,Simplicity,Malleable     2012-03-26 15:00:31

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