About:

Nick Babcock is a seasoned developer with a passion for web development, performance, and team leadership.

Website:

Specializations:

Interests:

Web development Performance Rust Wasm Homelab management

Incoming Links:

Outgoing Links:

Subscribe to RSS:
The blog post discusses the use of arena allocators in the Rust ecosystem, particularly in the context of WebAssembly (Wasm) and performance optimization for deserializing large binary data. It highlights the benefits of arena all...
The blog post discusses the issues related to using top-level await in web workers when loading WebAssembly (Wasm) modules through ES6 imports. It highlights how this can lead to dropped messages due to race conditions, particular...
The author reflects on the misconceptions surrounding WebAssembly (Wasm) and its integration with JavaScript, emphasizing that Wasm should not be treated as an implementation detail. The post discusses the compatibility of Wasm ac...
The article discusses the sunset of wasm-pack and its implications for the Rust and WebAssembly (Wasm) ecosystem. It highlights the benefits and drawbacks of wasm-pack, including performance issues and lack of features. The author...
The text discusses the use of SIMD gather instructions for optimizing data lookup processes. It explores the manual implementation of SIMD instructions, auto vectorization, memory latency, and the performance implications of using...
The author discusses their experience with DuckDB and Arrow while working on a data modeling project. They highlight the benefits and challenges of using DuckDB, including its portability, compression, and fast analytical capabili...
The text discusses different options for structuring a Bevy app for the web, including running it on the main thread, using OffscreenCanvas, and running everything in a web worker. It explores the challenges and benefits of each a...
The text discusses the curious word size of Webassembly (Wasm) and the advantages of SIMD within a register (SWAR) in the context of Wasm. It explores the implications of Wasm's 32-bit addressable space and 64-bit word size, and h...
The default musl allocator is causing a 7x slowdown in real world benchmarks compared to other allocators. The root cause is the contention between multiple threads when allocating memory, and the problem worsens as more threads o...
The text discusses the use of the pread() and pwrite() system calls in multithreaded applications, particularly in the context of ZIP archives. It compares the performance of traditional file reading methods with pread, and explor...
The text discusses the evolution of a web app architecture, from the first iteration in 2020 to the present day. It covers the use of Rust, Next.js, microservices, Vercel, Cloudflare, and the migration to Remix. The author also de...
The author shares their experience of moving code into Cloudflare workers and the struggle they faced with a troublesome endpoint that verifies the OpenID authentication signature directly with Steam. They encountered a 403 forbid...
The text discusses the hidden nuances of the JavaScript File API, highlighting the memory efficiency of files originating from file inputs, the challenges of buffering data into memory, and the limitations of creating a File objec...
The text discusses SQL reduction and optimization opportunities in an app with S3 files and a Postgres database. It covers logical bugs, optimizations, and the concept of asking for forgiveness instead of permission. It also empha...
The text discusses the author's experience migrating from Vercel to Cloudflare Pages for hosting Next.js. It highlights the challenges faced, such as compatibility issues, routing configuration, and limitations of Cloudflare Pages...
The author accidentally wiped the boot drive of their 7-year-old NAS, leading to a read-only file system. They decided to migrate to TrueNAS Scale for a fresh start, encountering difficulties with pool import and dataset hierarchy...
The text discusses the issue of file extensions and the potential logic bugs that can arise from not handling them consistently. It explores different approaches to solving this problem, including creating a file extension class, ...
The post discusses the creation of image sprite sheets for web applications. It covers topics such as creating a sprite sheet, file size optimizations, deterministic tiling, creating a lookup table, writing client-side code, alter...
The text discusses potential pitfalls of using React Query, a library for async state and data fetching management. It covers performance issues, waterfalls, request deduplication, retries, dynamic invalidation, DIY updates, and s...
The article discusses the use of CSS transitions and custom properties to create animations in web applications, arguing that many animation needs can be met with just CSS. It provides examples of real-world applications of transi...
The text discusses the concept of compound components in React, which involves breaking down a single component into multiple components to give more control to the client. It explores the drawbacks and benefits of compound compon...
The text discusses the value proposition of WebAssembly (Wasm) and addresses the misconceptions around its performance. It emphasizes that Wasm is not just about performance, but also about write once, consistency, composability, ...
The text discusses the author's experience in developing an incremental lexer and integrating it into an application. The author encountered issues with Wasm compilation time and output size, which led to an investigation into the...
The author discusses the challenges of migrating a Next.js application to a serverless environment and the limitations encountered with Vercel serverless functions. They explore the use of presigned upload URLs and the potential o...