A history of Chrome

A history of Chrome
about 1 hour by Addy Osmani

Chrome celebrates its 17th birthday. Addy walks through Chrome’s origins and evolution across these pillars, highlight key milestones, and share a few behind-the-scenes tidbits along the way. It’s been an incredible journey driven by relentless performance improvements, cutting-edge security efforts, and an uncompromising focus on user experience. Let’s dive in!

What is a color space?
40 minutes by Dan Hollick

In this guide Dan covers the fundamentals of digital color. It explains key concepts like color spaces, gamut, and bit depth. He also discusses color models, gamma correction, and color management systems. It aims to clarify confusing terminology in digital color theory.

Attention is the new Big O
15 minutes by Alex Chesser

Large language models process text differently than humans by weighing relationships between all words at once rather than reading sequentially. This attention mechanism makes prompt structure more important than word choice. Well-structured prompts with clear sections, numbered steps, and upfront key instructions guide the model's focus better than unorganized text blocks. This approach reduces wasted time, improves output quality, and creates maintainable prompting systems for engineering teams.

Let’s write a search engine
4 minutes by Amit Patel

Amit built a custom search feature for their website instead of relying on Google's site search. He converted his pages to plain text using Pandoc, creating a 1.6MB searchable text file. The system searches line by line and groups results by document. It works fast in browsers without needing complex indexing, though it currently shows results alphabetically rather than by relevance.

Cognitive load is what matters
18 minutes by Artem Zakirullin

Developers waste time and money when code creates confusion. This happens when code has high cognitive load, meaning it requires too much mental effort to understand. Simple techniques like using clear variable names, avoiding complex inheritance chains, and choosing self-describing error messages can dramatically reduce this burden and help new team members contribute quickly.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Everything I know about good API design