On Performance

There's been a lot of talk recently throughout tech-Twitter about the McMaster-Carr website

For good reason. Try it for yourself https://www.mcmaster.com/. I'll wait here until you're back.

Notice anything? Kenneth's not wrong, it's noticeably fast. It's an incredible demonstration of a commitment to performance and user-experience.

Behind the scenes, it's a testament to avoiding the allure of the flashiness and fanfare of "the next big thing" in web development. Staying simple and sticking to best practices is suddenly cool again.

McMaster's website is still more complex than a dramatic percentage of sites on the internet published today, yet through their development process they've been able to maintain a standard that is the envy of just about every modern web developer out there. Truly impressive.

The Next Big Thing

Way before Drew & I founded Articulation, we were engineers at a tiny (at the time) startup called Weebly. Web development was a completely different landscape.

Javascript was still the Wild West. jQuery hadn't won yet, classic Weebly used Prototype. CSS was a frustration we all "joked" about. IE6 was supported.

But, the websites were fast. We'd built a lightweight rendering engine that didn't overwhelm browsers, and we aggressively cached fully-built HTML versions of published sites in memcached. Our performance was world-beating at the time, and we'd quietly arrived at our own McMaster-Carr moment.

However, we too became tempted by "the next big thing" in web development. Our next-generation sites took a foray into server-side-rendering led to an unacceptable performance decline that took huge teams of people years to even begin to dig themselves out of. We had fallen for the trap, and our moment was over as quickly as our classic sites rendered.

What's Old is New Again, HTML edition

Nothing could be truer than the old adage: hindsight is always 20/20. When Drew and I decided to build Articulation, we had over 15 years of hindsight and experience. Because of our experience, we're able to stick to a familiar set of development principles: avoid flashiness, avoid bloat, build to best practices and build it simply. The McMaster-Carr example.

Obviously, we're lucky to have the experience to successfully build something that performs to this degree. We're also tremendously lucky that the web has moved on, and modern browser frameworks are more robust than ever. Basic HTML is more powerful than ever.

We're glad that a commitment to performance is at the forefront of the conversation, because it's our focus at Articulation. Our websites perform better as a result, take a look for yourself.