How WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill

IPC is something that is rarely top-of-mind when it comes to optimising cloud costs. But it turns out that if you IPC 1TB of video per second on AWS it can result in enormous bills when done inefficiently.

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HTML Form Validation is heavily underused

HTML Forms have powerful validation mechanisms, but they are heavily underused. In fact, not many people even know much about them. Is this because of some flaw in their design? Let’s explore.

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A Friendly Introduction to Container Queries

For a very long time, the most-requested CSS feature has been container queries. That’s been our holy grail, the biggest missing piece in the CSS toolkit. Well, container queries have finally arrived. They’ve been supported in all major browsers for almost two years.

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Building My Resume in HTML using Eleventy

In this article, I'll walk through some of the decisions I made as well as some challenges I faced along the way. The immediate benefit of building my resume with web-native technologies is that I can host my resume online! Web-native documents permit flexible layouts, enabling my resume to look good across a wide variety of browser and font sizes.

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How headless components became the future for building UI libraries

In the past few years, a new trend has emerged in React development: headless components. These are unstyled building blocks for UI development, including elements like buttons, dropdowns, and date pickers.

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Why Code Security Matters - Even in Hardened Environments

Infrastructure hardening makes applications more resilient to attacks. These measures raise the bar for attackers, making exploitation more difficult. However, they should not be seen as a silver bullet, as determined attackers can still leverage vulnerabilities in the source code.

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The Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe

This article was originally written in April 2021. In July 2024, I published an updated version with more data and new observations: The Trimodal Nature of Tech Compensation Revisited.

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