Nolan Lawson

  1. Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs

    All web developers know, at some level, that accessibility is important. But when push comes to shove, it can be hard to prioritize it above a bazillion other concerns when you’re trying to center a and you’re on a tight deadline. A lot of accessibility advocates lead with the moral argument: for example…

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  2. AI ambivalence

    I’ve avoided writing this post for a long time, partly because I try to avoid controversial topics these days, and partly because I was waiting to make my mind up about the current, all-consuming, conversation-dominating topic of generative AI. But Steve Yegge’s “Revenge of the junior developer” awakened…

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  3. Goodbye Salesforce, hello Socket

    Big news for me: after 6 years, I’m leaving Salesforce to join the folks at Socket, working to secure the software supply chain. Salesforce has been very good to me. But at a certain point, I felt the need to branch out, learn new things, and get out of my comfort zone. At Socket, I’ll […]

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  4. 2024 book review

    2024 was another lite reading year for me. The fact that it was an election year probably didn’t help, and one of my resolutions for 2025 is to spend a heck of a lot less time keeping up with the dreary treadmill of the 24-hour news cycle. Even videogames proved to be a better use […]

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  5. Avoiding unnecessary cleanup work in disconnectedCallback

    In a previous post, I said that a web component’s connectedCallback and disconnectedCallback should be mirror images of each other: one for setup, the other for cleanup. Sometimes, though, you want to avoid unnecessary cleanup work when your component has merely been moved around in the DOM: This can…

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  6. Why I’m skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in “faster” languages

    I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on. So maybe it’s natural that I get a worried pit in my stomach over the current mania to rewrite every Node.js…

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  7. The greatness and limitations of the js-framework-benchmark

    I love the js-framework-benchmark. It’s a true open-source success story – a shared benchmark, with contributions from various JavaScript framework authors, widely cited, and used to push the entire JavaScript ecosystem forward. It’s a rare marvel. That said, the benchmark is so good that it’s sometimes…

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  8. Web components are okay

    Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a good opportunity to reach across “the great divide” and try to find common ground rather than another opportunity to dunk on each other. Ryan…

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  9. Improving rendering performance with CSS content-visibility

    Recently I got an interesting performance bug on emoji-picker-element: I’m on a fedi instance with 19k custom emojis […] and when I open the emoji picker […], the page freezes for like a full second at least and overall performance stutters for a while after that. If you’re not familiar with Mastodon…

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  10. The continuing tragedy of emoji on the web

    Pop quiz: what emoji do you see below? [1] Depending on your browser and operating system, you might see: The flag of Martinique The old flag of Martinique (which kinda looks like the Quebecois flag) The enigmatic initials “MQ” This, frankly, is a mess. And it’s emblematic of how half-heartedly browsers…

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