Dean Hume

Speaking

I'll be speaking at OSCON 2015

I'm very happy to announce that I will be speaking at OSCON 2015 with my good friend Robin Osborne. We will be presenting a tutorial entitled "Automating web performance" which will run through a step-by-step guide to web performance and show you how to automate as much of your development

JavaScript

A Basic Guide to the Fetch API

As web developers, we often need the ability to retrieve data from the server in order to update our applications asynchronously. Traditionally this data is retrieved using JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object. A simple example of this might look something like the code below. In the code above, there are

Service Workers

Push Notifications on the Web - Google Chrome

A while ago I built a fun side project on Github to keep a collection of typography links and tools that caught my eye. There are a number of people that follow the project on Github, but every time I make a change or add a new link, I normally

Web Performance

Faster Mobile Websites - Slides

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to get the chance to present at UpFront Conference in Manchester. This was the inaugural year for the conference, and it was great to be apart of this event. A few people have asked about the slide deck and wanted to know more.

Web Performance

Responsibly harnessing the power of Prefetch using Google Analytics

If you browse the web today, there are many articles that explain what browser pre-loading is and how to use it, but very little explain how to actually use this feature in the real world. The ability to prefetch resources is powerful, but if used incorrectly it can turn out

Web Performance

Optimising Google Fonts for Fast Load Times

Using web fonts can be a great way to improve the look and feel of your website. I love tinkering with different font combinations on websites and seeing the changes they make. Unfortunately, adding web fonts to your site adds extra overhead to your site and can often slow your

Web Performance

Improved Compression Ratios Using Zopfli

Compressing files can be a very effective way of reducing their size as they are transferred between the server and a user's browser. Most modern browsers work effectively with compressed files and use lossless compression formats such as Gzip, Deflate or Zlib. In order to compress a file, an encoder

Google Chrome

Chrome Internal URLs: The Door to Narnia

Did you know that Chrome has a list of internal pages that allows you to see advanced flags and settings? There are some hidden gems inside the Google Chrome internal pages that give a useful insight into the hard work that the browser is doing behind the scenes. If you

Leadership

Good Engineering Manager / Bad Engineering Manager

During my daily commute into the office, I like to alternate between reading the newspaper and a good book. Lately I’ve been reading a book entitled “The Hard Thing about Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. It’s a great insight into the trials and tribulations of running your own

Speaking

I'm a Google Developer Expert!

I am very proud to announce that as of today, I am a Google Developer Expert. If you haven't heard of Google Developer Experts before, they are a global network of experienced product strategists, designers, developers and marketing professionals that actively support developers and startups. While this doesn't mean that

Speaking

I'll be speaking at UpFront Conference

I’m proud to say that I will be speaking at UpFront Conference in Manchester, UK on the 19th of May. UpFront Conference is in it’s first year and is billed as “a front-end conference for anyone who makes for the web”. The speaker line-up is packed with great

Programming

Animate Comment Nodes in the DOM

If you visit some of the most popular websites on the net today and view the source of their HTML, you might be surprised with what you find. There are often hidden gems and messages in the form of ASCII art embedded in their HTML comments. Troy Hunt recently wrote

Book

I'm Contributing to a Smashing Magazine Book - A Career On The Web

I am proud to say that I have been involved with and contributed to the latest Smashing Magazine book entitled A Career On The Web: On The Road To Success, this book provides a number of tips and best practices to guide you through the different stages of the job

Programming

A Basic Guide to Contributing on Github

I have a few open source projects that I host using Github. People often have great suggestions to improve the project, and the issues they report constantly shape and help build a better project. Unfortunately there are people who are sometimes reluctant, or unaware of how easy it is to

Fonts

Web Typography using Web Fonts

I love web typography! Only a few years ago, the ability to add custom fonts to a website seemed impossible. Fortunately, due to modern browsers we are now able to create beautiful websites using web fonts. While I have to admit that I am no designer, and struggle with CSS

Testing

Running Selenium Tests using Node.js

Browser automation is a great way to automate and test repeatable tasks in the browser. I've always been interested in browser automation and testing using tools such as Selenium. If you are looking for a way to ensure that your website runs as expected in many different browsers and devices,

HTML5

HTML5 Charts using Chart.js

Let's face it - everyone loves a good pie chart! Using charts makes information much easier to visualize. It is easier to see a pattern in a chart, but much more difficult when looking at raw data. In fact, there are loads of different web based charting solutions available to

Web Performance

Mozinar: 8 Simple Steps towards a Super Fast Website

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a major part in the way we use the web today. SEO techniques can make your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. I've long been a fan of the Moz blog and their free SEO tools that can help grow

Icons

Free Icon Packs for Developers - Part 2

A while ago I created a blog post with a list of free icon packs for developers that can be easily used on any website. The web is packed with loads of great icons, but they seem to be all over the place! I thought it would be handy to

Google Chrome

Quick Tip: Create Data URI's using Chrome

Here's a quick tip to use Google Chrome's Devtools to convert an image to a Data URI.

Speaking

I'll be speaking at Apps World Europe

I've been fortunate enough to be asked to present at this year's Apps World Europe in the HTML5 and mobile web track. The title of the talk is called Making your site fast - overcoming the speed of the mobile web and is focussed around the web performance of mobile

ASP.NET

The ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit needs your help!

The ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit has been running as an open source project since August 2010. It contains a rich set of controls that you can use to build ASP.NET websites using HTML5. If you've never used it before, it can be a great way to take advantage

Web Performance

Getting started with the Picture element

Responsive web design is awesome. It's changed the way we serve content to our users and has allowed us to offer a tailored experience to different screen sizes. It is really flexible and with a little bit of knowledge, anyone can get started. While this flexibility is great, it can

Web Performance

My Favourite Talks at Velocity Conference New York 2014

After a long flight and a little bit of jetlag, I've arrived back in London after visiting New York for Velocity Conference 2014. In typical Velocity fashion, the quality of the talks have been amazing and there have been a few highlights that are worth sharing. I thought it would

Web Performance

HTTP vs HTTPS performance comparison

Google recently announced that they will be starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal in their search algorithms. This means that websites that serve traffic over HTTPS with secure, encrypted connections will be slightly favoured over those websites that don't. During Google I/O, there was a big push