The below is transcribed from a 1991 talk by John Cleese titled Creativity in Management. I encourage you to watch the 30-minute recording on YouTube. The delivery is hilarious with great comedic timing that my transcript can’t begin to do justice. I edited the transcript for brevity, and added headings and links....

Until now, when you visited a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the server responded in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to the equivalent mobile URL (like en.m.wikipedia.org). This mobile URL in turn served the mobile version of the page.All wikis now serve mobile page views on the canonical domain,...

Two months ago, I deleted my YouTube subscriptions. I now follow YouTube channels in my feed reader instead (I use the NetNewsWire app). How does that work? Is it better? How to follow a channel On desktop, or on the mobile site, copy from the addres bar when on any channel page, or from the…

TL;DR: My updated take is Lockfiles for Node.js apps, not for other projects. When you run npm install, after you add or change a dependency in package.json, npm finds and selects the latest compatible version, downloads it, and replaces your package-lock.json file to describe what it found. The npm install command...

How does an open philosophy jive with best practices in performance and security? In short, we’re selective in our dependencies and audit our own upstream sources. Progressive enhancement not only makes for a fast and accessible site, I argue it’s also the cheaper choice in the long run! Background The Wikimedia...

Statistics and anecdotes about PHP at scale.

For two years in 2020 and 2021, I shared Wikipedia’s worldwide browser statistics on Mastodon under #browserstats. They looked a little something like this: As the data includes the browser’s major version, I wondered whether I could use this to follow the adoption rate through each browser’s release cycle. The...

Deploying HTTP/2 support to the Wikimedia CDN significantly changed how browsers negotiate and transfer data during the page load process. We found regressions in performance during the transition and are sharing the lessons we learned. Hello, HTTP/2! In 2016, the Wikimedia Foundation deployed HTTP/2 (or “H2”)...

The Internet Archive discovers in real-time when WordPress blogs publish a new post, and when Wikipedia articles reference new sources. How does that work? Wikipedia Wikipedia, and its sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikidata, run on the MediaWiki open-source software. One of its core features is “Recent...

I miss the era of very Internet-y things, geocities-style scavenger hunts, with easter eggs and all. So, I devised a treasure hunt of my own! → Enter here