The Wrong Work, Done Beautifully
A jsdom maintainer reflects on the project's purpose, its challenges, and questions its relevance in a world of headless browsers.
Domenic Denicola is a former browser engineer and web standards contributor, known for his work on JavaScript promises, modules, streams, and WHATWG APIs. He writes about web platform design, performance, and emerging AI capabilities in the browser.
10 articles from this blog
A jsdom maintainer reflects on the project's purpose, its challenges, and questions its relevance in a world of headless browsers.
A Google Chrome engineer reflects on his 11-year career working on web standards and APIs, and announces his retirement.
A Chrome engineer discusses the design challenges and considerations for creating new built-in AI web APIs, focusing on the prompt API and task-based models.
A developer shares their firsthand experience participating in a METR study that found AI-assisted coding tasks took 19% longer, using the jsdom project as a case study.
Explores recent algorithmic improvements in spaced repetition systems (SRS), focusing on the new FSRS algorithm for more efficient learning.
Argues against the 'lossy compression' analogy for LLMs like ChatGPT, proposing instead that they are simulators creating temporary simulacra.
A critique of DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest, arguing it spams open source maintainers with low-quality PRs and increases burnout.
Explores the philosophical implications of consciousness arising from mathematical structures and simulations, inspired by Greg Egan's Permutation City.
Explains non-blocking I/O for sockets, comparing low-level syscalls to high-level async APIs and event loops.
Explores translating blocking file I/O from C's read() to non-blocking JavaScript, focusing on concurrency and data race challenges.