Eberhardt, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lynn), author

This week, we chat about the science behind breaking the 2-hour marathon barrier, storing data in DNA strands, and a dinosaur’s zigzagging backbones with Online News Editor Catherine Matacic. And Carolina Levis joins Alexa Billow to discuss evidence that humans have been domesticating the Amazon’s plants a lot longer than previously thought.   Read Carolina Levis’s research in Science.     Listen to previous podcasts.   [Image: Carolina Levis; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

This week we have stories on the new capabilities of science balloons, connections between deforestation and drug trafficking in Central America, and new insights into the role ancient Egypt had in taming cats with Online News Editor David Grimm. Sarah Crespi talks to Mary Caswell Stoddard about why bird eggs come in so many shapes and sizes. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image:; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

When Indonesia’s Mount Toba blew its top some 74,000 years ago, an apocalyptic scenario ensued: Tons of ash and debris entered the atmosphere, coating the planet in ash for 2 weeks straight and sending global temperatures plummeting. Despite the worldwide destruction, humans survived. Sarah Crespi talks with Online News Editor Catherine Matacic about how life after Toba was even possible—were humans decimated, or did they rally in the face of a suddenly extra hostile planet? Next, Julia Buck of the University of California, Santa Barbara, joins Sarah to discuss her Science commentary piece on landscapes of disgust. You may have heard of a landscape of fear—how a predator can influence an ecosystem not just by eating its prey, but also by introducing fear into the system, changing the behavior of many organisms. Buck and colleagues write about how disgust can operate in a similar way: Animals protect themselves from parasites and infection by avoiding disgusting things such as dead animals of the same species or those with disease. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Emma Forsber/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Chemists have long known how to convert carbon dioxide into fuels—but up until now, such processes have been too expensive for commercial use. Staff Writer Robert Service talks with host Sarah Crespi about using new filters and catalysts to close the gap between air-derived and fossil-derived gasoline.   Also this week, host Sarah Crespi talks with Nitish Padmanaban of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, about replacing bifocals with “autofocals.” These auto-focusing glasses track your eye position and measure the distance to the visual target before adjusting the thickness of their liquid lenses. The prototype glasses have an onboard camera and batteries that make them particularly bulky; however, they still outperformed progressive lenses in tests of focus speed and acuity. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.   Download a transcript (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts.   About the Science Podcast  

On this week’s show, Contributing Correspondent Kai Kupferschmidt talks with host Sarah Crespi about modeling coronavirus spread and the role of forecasts in national lockdowns and other pandemic policies. They also talk about the launch of a global trial of promising treatments. See all of our News coverage of the pandemic here. See all of our Research and Editorials here. Also this week, Nadine Gogolla, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, talks with Sarah about linking the facial expressions of mice to their emotional states using machine learning. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast Download a transcript (PDF)

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Montgomery, Scott L., author

‘Chosen Spirits’ is neither simple dystopic science-fiction nor straightforward political satire, but a call for freedom in an age of puppy adoption shows.

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Dewey Library - JF2051.R67 2018

Director general for the Centre of Science and Environment was hit by a vehicle.

Webster, James G

Panel:

• Aimee Knight
• Charles Max Wood
• Christopher Ferdinandi (Boston)

Special Guests: Dan Shappir (Tel Aviv)

In this episode, the panel talks with Dan Shappir who is a computer software developer and performance specialist at Wix.com. As Dan states, his job is to make 100 million websites (hosted on the Wix platform) load and execute faster! Past employment includes working for companies, such as: Ericom, Ericom Software, and BackWeb. He studied at Technion Institute of Management and currently lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. The panel talks about web performance API among other things. Check it out!

Show Topics:

1:29 – Charles: Let us know who you are and why you’re famous!

1:39 – “Hello!” from Dan Shappir.

2:25 – Charles: You should say that you go to EACH site EVERY day out of the millions of sites out there.

2:53 – Charles: My mom mentioned Wix to me at first. My mom teaches High School Math.

3:16 – Dan: Yes that is our mission statement. That everyone can get a website without the knowledge of how to build a website.

3:52 – Aimee makes her comments.

3:59 – Dan: On our platform we try to offer people flexibility. There are bounds and limits, but people can do their very own thing, though. To make Wix faster because as we add more features and functionality that is our goal.

4:40 – Chuck: Okay, I know how to make X perform a little bit better. You are looking at a platform that controls TONS of sites, how do you even go about that?

4:58 – Dan: It is more difficult then that. We have millions of users leveraging the platform but there are a lot of developers in Wix who are developing the platform. I don’t think anyone at Wix has a total grasp of the complexity of the platform that we built. We have hundreds of frontend people working on our platform. All of them have pieces to the kingdom. We have processes in place with code reviews and whatnot, but there is so much going on. There is a change every 2 minutes, 24/7. We need to make sure progressing instead of regressing. 

6:54 – Aimee: I think it was interesting in one of the links you sent over. Because you know when something is getting worse you consider that a bug.

7:15 – Dan: It is more than a bug because if we see regression in performance then that is a problem. I can literally see any part of the organization and say, “stop” if it will

7:57 – Chuck: We are talking about performance, but what does that mean? What measures are there?

8:15: Dan: We are looking at performance can mean different things in different contents. User sites, for example, most important aspect is load time. How quickly the page loads and gets open to the viewer to that specific site. When they click something they want it instantly and no drag time. It does change in different contexts.

9:58 – Chuck: People do talk about load time. People have different definitions of it.

10:12: Dan: Excellent question. When you look at the different sites through Wix. Different people who build sites – load time can mean something else to everybody. It can mean when you see the MAIN text or the MAIN image. If it’s on an ECON site then how soon can they purchase or on a booking site, how long can the person book X product.

I heard someone at a conference say that load time is when: HERO TEXT And HERO IMAGE are displayed.

12:14 – Chuck: What is faster React or Vue?

12:21 – NEW HOST: Not sure. It all depends.

12:34 – Dan: We are big into React. We are one of the big React users outside of Facebook. I joined Wix four years ago, and even back then we were rebuilding our framework using React. One of our main modifications is because we wanted to do server-side rendered.

13:27 – Christopher asks Dan a question.

14:16 – Dan: We are in transition in this regard. Before we were totally client-site rendered, and that was the case until middle of last year. Then we deployed...

Dan: We are 100% server-side rendered now. Some things we are still using JavaScript. We have another project going on now and it’s fully CSS, and little JavaScript as possible. What you might want to do with that site is...

You might get in a few months every Wix site will be visible even if JavaScript is disabled.

16:26 – Aimee adds in her comments and observations to this topic.

16:55 – Dan: We don’t want things displayed incorrectly before it lays out. We hide the content while it’s downloading then make it visible. They lay-outing are done faster, because...

17:44 – Christopher asks Dan a question.

18:04 – Dan: I got into API...

Either you are moving forward or are you moving back. AKA – You are either progressing or regressing.

Different stages:

1.) Development stage

2.) Pre-Production (automated tools that check the performance with specific use cases)

3.) Check it out!

It’s beneficial to use these APIs.

21:11 – Christopher: What is performance APIs?

21:38 – Dan: There is a working group – Todd from Microsoft and others who are exposing the information (that is available in the browser) out into the browser. When the browser downloads a certain source (image, font, etc.) it can measure the various stages of downloading that feature.  You have these different sages of downloading this resource. The browser can measure each of these stages and then expose them to you. Basically it’s for the browser to expose this information to you and in a way that is coherent and uniform. It essentially maintains this buffer that puts performance entries sequentially.

Dan continues explaining this topic in detail.

25:55 – Dan: You have this internal buffer...

28:45 – Advertisement – Sentry – They support opensource.

29:39 – Christopher: everything you are saying seems that I can use this or that tab right now...

Why would I prefer the API to something visual, hypothetically?

30:03 – Dan: Three Different Stages. (See above.)

This information is very, very helpful during the developmental stage. Say you got a link from someone...

Dan mentions: Performance.mark

34:04 – Aimee: When you were talking about resource-ends. Many people don’t know what this is. Can you spend 2-3 minutes about how you guys are using these? Are there people can add for big bang for their buck?

34:41 – Dan: This might want to be a topic for its own podcast show.

Dan gives a definition of what a resource-end means.

Go back to fonts as an example.

Pre-connect for example, too.

39:03 – Dan: Like I said, it’s a huge topic.

You have to exercise some care. Bandwidth is limited. Make sure you aren’t blocking other resources that you do need right now.

40:02 – Aimee: Sounds like a lot of great things to tap into. Another question I have is about bundling.

40:27 – Dan: One of the things that we try to do (given that we are depending on the JavaScript we are downloading) we need to download JavaScript content to the client side. It has been shown often that JS is the most impactful resources that you need to download. You really want to be as smart as possible with that. What is even more challenging is the network protocols are changing.

Dan continues to go in-depth about this topic.

Dan: What we have found is that you want to strive to bundle resources together.

44:10 – Aimee: Makes sense.

44:15 – Dan continues talking about this topic.

45:23 – Chuck asks two questions. (First question is now and second question is at 51:32.)

2 Questions:

1. You gather information from web performance AI - What system is that?

45:42 – Dan: I am not the expert in that. I will try not to give misleading information. Actually let me phrase it different. There are 3^rd party tools that you can use leverage in your website. IF you are building for commercial reasons I highly recommend that you use performance-monitoring solution. I am not going to advertise one because there are tons out there. We ended up rolling out our own infrastructure because our use case is different than most.

At a conference I talked with a vendor and we talked about...

51:32 – 2^nd Question from Charles to Dan: Now you’ve gathered this information now what to you do? What patterns? What do you look for? And how do you decide to optimize things?

54:23 – Chuck: Back to that question, Dan. How should they react to it and what are they looking for

54:41 – Dan: Three main ways: 1.) Generate alerts 2.) See trends over long period of time 3.) Looking at real-time graphs.

Frontend developer pro is that likely being woken up in the middle of the night is lower. We might be looking at the real time graph after we deployed...

57:31 – Advertisement – Get a Coder Job!

58:10 – Picks!

Links:

• JavaScript
• jQuery
• React
• Elixir
• Elm
• Vue
• Wix
• Window Performance
• Web Performance
• Terra Genesis
• Terra Genesis: Space Colony
• The One Thing
• DevChat TV – YouTube
• GitHub: Off Side
• HBO: Insecure
• Wix: Engineering
• JavaScript Riddle
• JavaScript Riddles for Fun and for Profit
• Dan Shappir’s Twitter
• Dan Shappir’s LinkedIn
• Dan Shappir’s Crunch Base
• Dan Shappir’s GitHub
• Dan Shappir’s Talk through Fluent
• Dan Shappir’s Medium
• Dan Shappir’s YouTube Talk: JavaScript riddles for fun and profit

Sponsors:

• Code Badges
• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean
• Cache Fly
•  

Picks:

Aimee:

• Waking up early!
• How to Deal with Dirty Side Effects in Your Pure Functional JavaScript

Chris:

• Offside - Toomuchdesign
• Insecure TV Show

Charles:

• Terraform - Game
• “The One Thing"
• Code Badge
• DevChat on YouTube

Dan

• Wix Engineering
• JavaScript Riddle

Sponsors

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan
• CacheFly

Host: Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: Dan Shappir

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles hosts Dan Shappir from Tel Aviv, Israel, who is a computer software developer and performance specialist at Wix.

Listen to Dan on the podcast JavaScript Jabber on this episode.

Dan got a TI-99/4 when he was very young and enjoyed programming games. He first started with Basic language. After he studied Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he joined the Israel army to serve his military service. While in the military he also obtained his Masters Degree in Computer Science.

Currently Dan is working as a Performance Tech Lead at Wix, he works on  speeding up the delivery and execution of 50+ million websites hosted on the Wix platform, as well as Wix own applications and services.

Links

• JavaScript Jabber 334: “Web Performance API” with Dan Shappir
• Dan Shappir’s Twitter
• Dan Shappir’s LinkedIn
• Dan Shappir’s Crunch Base
• Dan Shappir’s GitHub
• Dan Shappir’s Talk through Fluent
• Dan Shappir’s Medium
• Wix
• Dan Shappir’s YouTube Talk: JavaScript riddles for fun and profit
• https://www.facebook.com/DevChattv

Picks

Dan Shappir:

• Open Source Functional JavaScript Library
• Dan's JavaScript Riddles on Twitter
• Dan's JavaScript Riddles in Conference Talk
• Wix Engineering Blog

Charles Max Wood:

• VDOT O2
• Charles Max Wood Instagram Account

Sponsors

• Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit

• CacheFly

Panel

• Charles Max Wood
• Joe Eames
• Christopher Buecheler
• Aimee Knight
• AJ O’Neal

Joined by special guest: Dan Shappir

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, special guest Dan Shappir, Performance Tech Lead at Wix, kicks off the discussion by defining server-side rendering (SSR) along with giving its historical background, and touches on the differences between server rendering and server-side rendering. He helps listeners understand in detail how SSR is beneficial for the web and takes questions from the panel about how it affects web performance in cases where first-time users and returning users are involved, and how does SSR fare against technologies such as pre-rendering. He then elaborates on the pitfalls and challenges of SSR including managing and declaring variables, memory leaks, performance issues, handling SEO, and more, along with ways to mitigate them. In the end, Dan sheds some light on when should developers use SSR and how should they start working with it.

Links

• Dan’s Twitter
• Dan’s GitHub
• SSR
• WeakMap

Follow JavaScript Jabber on Devchat.tv, Facebook and Twitter.

Picks

Christopher Buecheler:

• Tip - Take some time off once in a while

Aimee Knight:

• Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects

AJ O’Neal:

• Fatherhood!

Joe Eames:

• Tiny Towns

• The Goldbergs

Charles Max Wood:

• EverywhereJS

• Christopher Buecheler’s books

• Get a Coder Job - Publishing soon!

Dan Shappir:

• Quora

• Corvid by Wix

• You Gotta Love Frontend Conferences

Online Resource

Gerges, Fawaz A., 1958- author

Marquardt, Jens, author

Bullvalene's constant metamorphosis could be exploited in sensing applications

Bullvalene's constant metamorphosis could be exploited in sensing applications

Titanium-dioxide stars lance the skin with microscopic holes to allow medicine through

Graduate student Safia Jilani shares what she learned from this year's conference

Mechanically chiral rotaxane creates a catalytic pocket a little like an enzyme

The first female CEO of a European chemical major begins a financial, social, and environmental overhaul of one of the oldest chemical firms

The coronavirus pandemic may mark a rebalancing of where drugs are made as nations recognize a security imperative

The mortal remains of the 16 migrant labourers, who were killed after a goods train ran over them in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad on Friday, had been sent to their native state Madhya Pradesh on a special train.

Taking suo motu cognizance of media reports, the Commission has directed State Chief Secretary and District Magistrate of Aurangabad to submit a detailed report within four weeks.

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Rotch Library - HT361.S4963 2018

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Rotch Library - HT166.E474 2018

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The most important improvements concern its national security structures and their work, and flexibility in thinking

Fill fresh engine oil and coolant before you store it away

8 migrant workers killed in road mishaps in Maharashtra during lockdown

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Rotch Library - HD7371.7.A4 S45 2012

Rotch Library -