Hello, I'm Matt. I built my first website over 20 years ago and I’ve been coding things ever since! I'm currently a developer at The Financial Times and this is my blog about (mainly front-end) web development.
Three years ago I shared the struggles my team faced trying to get Webpack 4 to compile files with consistent names across the 20+ separate codebases which serve FT.com. Webpack 5 was released soon after my post and one change in particular would have made our struggles almost entirely redundant.
Node has always shipped with enough features to create basic web services but until recently it's standard library has been fairly bare bones. Thankfully, Node has started to include functionality for some of the most repeated use cases and features from the Web platform have started appearing too.
My heatmap was not very good because the shops and restaurants I'd plotted were a proxy for a population map rather than highlighting outstandingly fancy places so I learned how to read the British National Grid.
This tiny sugary extension has made cloning, merging, and expanding iterable things so simple but this powerful little operator has a cost.
How does FT.com serve 40 million page views a month? With help from an old, imperfect and somewhat inefficient solution.
And there are 30 more posts in the archive…