Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The HHVM team has concluded its first ever open source performance lockdown, and we’re very excited to share the results with you. During our two week lockdown, we’ve made strides optimizing builtin functions, dynamic properties, string concatenation, and the file cache. In addition to improving HHVM, we also looked for places in the open source…
Trust, Live Preview, and Menus in the Customizer One of the most important things in WordPress is users being able to feel confident as they make changes to their content and more generally to their sites. Being able to make non-destructive changes and preview them is an important component of building that trust. This is…
After Spencer Kimball left Google, he found himself missing some of the custom-built software the company uses internally. So he and a bunch of fellow ex-Googlers started building their own. And now they want to make it available to everyone to power the next Google or Facebook. Specifically, Kimball wanted something like Google’s database system Spanner….
NGINX release 1.9.1 introduces a new feature that enables use of the SO_REUSEPORT socket option, which is available in newer versions of many operating systems, including DragonFly BSD and Linux (kernel version 3.9 and later). This socket option allows multiple sockets to listen on the same IP address and port combination. The kernel then load…
My colleague Loren Segal shared the blog post below. As you can see, he’s really excited about the new AWS SDK for Go! — Jeff; Today we are announcing the first Developer Preview Release of the AWS SDK for Go (v0.6.0). If you have not been following along with development, the AWS SDK for Go…
Contributors on the Menu Customizer feature plugin are proposing its inclusion in WordPress 4.3. Nick Halsey posted the Customizer Team’s proposal last night, beginning with a summary of the purpose of moving menu management into the customizer: In the process, we hope to offer an updated design with improved user flow, a mobile-first interface, improved…
So, we’ve been messing around a lot with Google’s A/B testing tools on our website lately. Like, a lot. This toolset allows us to “test-drive” alternative versions of our site for a select audience of live customers, and see which option puts more money in the bank. I like A/B testing. It paid for our…
Until now, mining good journalism from the web’s depths has been done from the top. Over the last 13 years, looking for “signals” that flag quality content has been at the core of Google News: With a search engine scanning and ranking 50,000 sources in 30 languages and 72 editions, its inventor, the famous computer…
The naming convention for the majority of the people in my country is the paradigm case and nobody really does anything differently. Names are all representable in US ASCII. Unicode has properly solved the problem of language encoding. Gender is immutable and fits cleanly into an enumerated list of two options. A person’s legal…
Last year Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, raised $160 million. Now the publishing software company is spending some of that money, by acquiring WooCommerce, an e-commerce tools company. Sources say Automattic will spend more than $30 million in cash and stock to buy the 55-person company. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg wouldn’t comment on the price…