SNIPPETS

Examples of my work and what I think about.

Searching: To Index Or Not To Index?

Searching can be tricky. To hone my skills with indexing I have become an expert with mongoDB and understanding how to speed up search. You can check out the results in an interactive format below:

GraphQL: Querying Directly From the Client

GraphQL can not only create a dramatically faster experience by calling only the data you need, but also by calling the query directly from the client. In this country "study card" game, the country names and the particular needed fields (country code and capital) are queried in this way.

Responsive Images

To get the best performance and look out of your site, it's important to have images that are only as large as you need them. There are several ways to do this, one of which is to provide an image with multiple alternative sizes so that the browser can decide based on display size, bandwidth etc. While image srcset help to provide these alternatives based on display width or density and client hints can determine a loading image based on network speeds, I wanted to play with the idea of retrieving an image that was optimally sized when these features would not work (e.g. a browser not supporting client hints or using an image that was not hardcoded).

The code below calculates an approximate network speed in the browser, then uses that to optimize the image it returns.

Experiments

Sometimes I like to create interesting stuff, ranging from CSS animations to backend optimizations with new frameworks. While this can take time on a project it's important to keep creativity going. You can