< Shouvik Mitra />

Dealing with user activity in web applications is almost always an afterthought. To that, we should also understand that this is not something new and has been happening for quite a long time by major platforms and websites out there.  I am no judge to say if it is a good practice or not, but as an engineer, I will try to note down the recent development in this space over the years. And, moreover, if you are tasked to do something similar for your new app, how you can go about doing it. Let's talk about the basics Our primary goal is to reliable track user's activity without affecting the application performance. Now, what is categorized as user activity is something we will address in a future blog, but regardless of the granularity of the data what is our concern at the moment is how we collect metrics data from a technical perspective. Overarchingly, we have two kinds of data being passed around the server and browser. Namely, analytical data and transactional data. O...

Today, we are going to talk about an additional tool to help you maintain a fine balance between instancy and freshness when delivering data to your web applications. RFC5861 states two independent Cache-Control extensions that allow for the cache to respond to a request with the most up-to-date response held. 1. The stale-if-error HTTP Cache-Control extension allows a cache to return a stale response when an error such as Internal Server Error is encountered, rather than returning a hard error. This improves availability. 2. The stale-while-revalidate HTTP Cache-Control extension allows a cache to immediately return a stale response while it revalidates it in the background, thereby hiding latency (both in the network and on the server) from clients In this blog, we will be talking more about the stale-while-revalidate HTTP header. The basic idea of this header is to reduce the latency of serving cached content by your web browser to your application and have a refresh mechanism v...

A majority of the web is still accessed via slow 2G networks, so when it comes to web speed optimizations, developers should take the responsibility to make their web apps as optimized as it could possibly be. Most of you might think that increasing speed performance trades of with user experience. Well, frankly speaking, most of the time it does, but it doesn't need to be that way! In this article, I will be sharing top 3-speed optimization strategies which will help you bring a smile to your users face even on slow network speed. 1. Images Images should be the appropriate format, compression, and size; and loaded only when necessary The images commonly contribute to a majority portion of your website. Thus, it is very important to serve your static images in an optimized and performant way. To be successful with images, it is necessary that you automate and systemize them. Checklist : Appropriate format Appropriate compression Appropriate for display size and dens...

Hello there, Thanks for joining me on my blog, and today I will be sharing the ultimate way to start Web Development with tweaks that I have learned from my experience. Well, it is going to be a rather long journey to cover the whole of Web Development so what I am thinking to do is splitting the whole post into logically divided small meaningful posts. So, right now you are reading the first part of my Web Development- Getting Started article. Well, without further adieu,  let's get started! In today's world, the Web resembles to be a place where we all live a virtual life. Ranging from social utilities like Facebook, Twitter to workplace web apps like Github, and Google Business, we experience a virtual touch every day. Well if we are surfing around a place for a while, visiting awesome stores (Amazon), and socializing in there with people we haven't met physically, then it is not a bad idea to buy a place there to live in. Well, most of you got what I am talking...