Web workers, which we already took a look at in a previous post, are very useful for parallelizing long-running CPU-bound work client-side so it doesn't freeze up a website while it's running. If you're using Webpack, you have the option of compiling your worker script as a separate bundle using the worker loader.
Read more →Webpack is an awesome tool for building and bundling your web assets, and I've used it in all of my web projects for a couple of years now. Although it's possible to use just Webpack and nothing else for your client-side builds, I've found that using it with a task runner like Gulp gives you the most flexibility and helps to keep your build pipeline as simple as possible.
Read more →Most of the time, JavaScript developers don't need to worry about CPU-intensive tasks. Every once in a while, though, some long-running, CPU-heavy work needs to be done client-side (for example, plotting an equation on a graph). If you try to do that sort of work in plain-old JavaScript client-side, it will block and cause the website to freeze up and become unresponsive until it's done, which isn't very good UX.
Read more →The HTML5 canvas API exposes methods for drawing simple shapes on a canvas, and there are several libraries out there that provide high-level abstractions to make drawing complicated shapes easier (e.g. Fabric.js). Sometimes, though, you may need to manipulate your image's pixel data directly. This requires a low-level canvas API and isn't very intuitive - so in this post, I'll explain how it works.
Read more →I'm a full-stack developer with more than a decade of experience designing, building, deploying, and monitoring web applications and APIs. My specialties are AWS, JavaScript, and .NET. You can read more about me on the about me page.
This is my personal dev blog. Not everything I write about here is work-related or even useful, but I do try to keep it interesting.
