Amitav Roy

Recently I was working on performance improvement on my blog post. It all started when I was writing the article Mobile-first Google Indexing - Are you ready with your website for this change. During the Lighthouse scan one thing which was glaring to me was the size of the JavaScript file. And, that’s when I realized that I have made such a silly mistake. In this article, I am going to talk you through some of the important changes that I made to my blog. And, how they had a significant impact on the performance of my blog.

Google mobile first indexing is not something new. Google scans the content of our website's to know what's there on our website. And, when a user is looking for such content, our website can be a potential search result. For many days, Google used to look at the desktop version of our website. But, now the trend is changing. Google has confirmed that more focus is on mobile content.

In today’s fast changing market adoption to change is paramount. It doesn't matter how big a company or business is. If they are not quick to adapt to changes, then they can face disruption very soon. One example would be how Nokia which was a leader in the mobile market is now almost non-existent.

The big release is here, Tailwind 2.0 is out. You must have already heard about it and that's how you must have landed on this article. But, if you have not then also you are at the right place. I am going to tell you a few very important points about why you should use this CSS framework.

Recently, I have been doing a lot of TypeScript based JavaScript development in React and Node JS as well. For more than 10 years, I have worked with PHP and it’s eco system along with JavaScript. So, I worked with dynamically typed languages a lot. However, I used to read about what statically typed languages are and about their merits. So I slowly started to do a little bit of static type like code in PHP.

The image tag has been with us since the beginning of HTML. I am sure, stats can prove that it is one of the most used tag cross web. There is a famous saying that “A picture is worth a thousand word”. And the world wide web is full of images. However, not much was done to the image tag from what it was 10 years back right? According to Next JS, 50% of total bytes on the web is taken by Images only.

Coming from a PHP and Laravel background, I have a lot of expectations from the framework that I will be using for any project. By working for almost a decade in PHP and with Laravel for the last 4 to 5 years I got use to a lot of niceties available with this framework. And, I think apart from the framework, the huge collection of packages and amazing tooling available not only does this framework allow rapid development but also gives a lot of attention towards the developers.

So, I read about this new feature on Twitter not sure who made that tweet or was it a sponsored one. But I saw that Microsoft has release Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) version 2. Now, I was not even aware version 1 existed (I guess I was too outdated in the windows world) but this news caught my attention. Windows and Linux in the same tweet. Well, that’s interesting I thought and started reading about the feature.

**Laravel Livewire** is a new package developed by Caleb Porzio which really changes the approach of how you do front end development. It is a composer package which allows you to create components in PHP which are reactive as well similar to Vue or React. The entire component code is inside PHP and blade files but you get a feeling of and SPA. Initially, everything will look very magical as you are writing only PHP code but getting JavaScript behaviour. But, once you start getting hold of things you will understand the beauty of this project and how it really speeds up your development time. How a user interacting with the component can directly trigger a server side function. How it can re-render pieces of data inside a website, so on and so forth.

In one of my recent projects, I wanted to set up a process where my code is checked for code formatting and unit tests are executed automatically before the code is pushed to the git repository. We have worked with Gitlab pipelines where code is validated against multiple php versions and it will automatically notify if any code commit is breaking anything.