The Weekliest Links, You Say Big Data I Say Small Data Edition

March 27th, 2015 by Wes

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About GAME BOY (but were too afraid to ask). This nearly 15 year old text file contains everything (and I mean everything) you ever wanted to know about the 1989 Nintendo Gameboy. The author gushes over it’s scrappy little z80 8-bit processor, the way it stores tiles in a single byte, and the input register changes that happen when playing Ms. Packman. If you like hardware and video games, this is a fascinating read.

Which is the more efficient solution for loading scripts in a HTML document: simulating async loading with script injection or a blocking synchronous script tag? It’s frequently considered a performance best practice to use script injection for loading Javascript. However, there are some often overlooked performance gotchas with this common pattern. Ilya Grigorik gives us the rundown.

An interesting look at whether you should always jump to the distributed solution when facing large data sets. From the intro: “Rather than making your computation go faster, the systems introduce substantial overheads which can require large compute clusters just to bring under control. In many cases, you’d be better off running the same computation on your laptop.” And the follow up.