Critical CSS in the Modern Era
Inline the CSS needed to render above-the-fold content; load the rest asynchronously. The savings on slow networks are real — first paint happens on the…
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HTTP/3 in Practice
HTTP/3 runs over QUIC, which uses UDP. The big win is head-of-line blocking elimination at the transport layer — one slow packet does not stall…
Read article →Brotli vs gzip: When Brotli Wins
Brotli compresses 15–25% better than gzip for HTML, CSS, and JS at higher compression levels. The catch is encoding cost — Brotli level 11 is…
Read article →Schema.org JSON-LD: What to Emit
Five high-value types: WebSite with SearchAction, Organization or Person for brand identity, BreadcrumbList on every inner page, Article/BlogPosting on posts, and Product on commer…
Read article →Container Images That Actually Cache
Order Dockerfile steps from least-changing to most-changing. COPY package.json package-lock.json ./ and RUN npm ci belong above COPY . . so deps are cached across…
Read article →GitHub Actions Caching Strategy
Cache by lock-file hash, restore by prefix. The cache key looks like npm-hashFiles('package-lock.json') with restore key npm-.For matrix builds, include the OS and Node version…
Read article →Blue-Green vs Canary Deploys
Blue-green spins up a parallel environment, runs smoke tests, then flips traffic. Rollback is fast — just flip back. Cost: double the infrastructure during the…
Read article →Postgres Backups That Actually Restore
A backup you have not tested is not a backup. Schedule monthly restores into a staging environment — automate the verification.For Postgres, pg_dump for logical…
Read article →Zero-Downtime Migrations in Practice
Three-phase pattern for schema changes: add the new column, dual-write to both, backfill in batches, switch reads, drop the old column. Each phase is independently…
Read article →Observability vs Monitoring
Monitoring tells you something is wrong (alerts, dashboards). Observability tells you why (traces, logs, structured events).The minimum useful set: structured logs with request IDs…
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