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.
