Sleep Testing

One of the most important things you can do for your health, happiness, and productivity is to get enough sleep.  You have probably heard this so many times that it feels like white noise at this point, but what if you could actually do it?  What if you could wake up refreshed and energetic every day, and not struggle to get out of bed?  I believe this is achievable for everyone - as long as you are willing to take the time to methodically test your sleep schedule, and make a few minor changes to your bedtime routine.

14 Day Challenge - Information Diet

In the spirit of the 30-day challenges popularized by Matt Cutts (among others), I have spent the last 14 days on an "information diet".  This is not a new idea by any means, and in fact there was an entire book written about the concept.  I actually heard about it initially from Tim Ferris, and this post on the 4-Hour Life Blog.  Anyway, enough with the background - what the heck is this about?

Coursera Review: Intro to Computer Networks

I recently finished my first Coursera class, Introduction to Computer Networks.  This was a 10 week long class, and I spent approximately 3-4 hours per week on it.  If you are thinking of taking a Coursera class, and this one in particular, then read on...

A Comprehensive Guide to WebP

WebP (pronounced "weppy") is an ambitious and promising new image format that was created by a team at Google back in September of 2010, but browser adoption has been slow.  At the time of this writing the only major browsers that support WebP are Chrome and Opera, even though support in native applications is strong (albeit with plugins in many cases).  In this article I want to present an unbiased, holistic view of the WebP landscape as it stands today.  My end goal is to further the conversation about alternate image formats and image compression on the web, because I believe it is one of the biggest opportunities for making web browsing faster across all devices and networks.

How Much CSS Should You Have?

I've noticed recently that it's becoming more and more common to see websites with WAY too much CSS.   I realized that I've never seen specific guidelines around how much CSS a website should have, and no clear narrative around the impact of total CSS transfer size.  Most people just say "as little as possible" or "just write what you need and then optimize".  On the whole I think these statements are a bit too vague to be useful.  In addition, there are a lot of articles about "optimizing" CSS (a.k.a  writing more efficient selectors), which has quickly diminishing returns.  In this article I will talk specifically about how big your CSS files should be, and talk about some other possible pitfalls when authoring CSS.