Read the Tea Leaves
Nolan Lawson — Software engineer and open source maintainer
Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson
nolanlawson.comWe'll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor...the GitHub repo saying "I made this."
Nolan Lawson's blog is one of the best places to read about web performance, browser APIs, and the state of the web platform. He backs up his opinions with data — running benchmarks, testing across browsers, and showing his work. His writing is clear, opinionated, and deeply informed by years of building for the web.
Written by Nolan Lawson since 2011.
Occasional
Publishes a few times per month
3
Independent Blog
English
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You had a story
You had a story you used to tell yourself about how you got here in life. You’d share the story with others. Maybe you’d be at a party, and someone would ask what you do, and you’d say, “I’m a programmer.” And their eyes would perk up and their mind would fill with images of ball pits and propeller beanies and that funny movie with Jesse Eisenberg, and they’d say, “Oh yeah, like you build apps?” And you’d proudly brush it off and say so...
Days of miracle and wonder
Oprah Winfrey and I have something in common, which is that our favorite album is Paul Simon’s Graceland. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the opening track, “The Boy in the Bubble”. The song can be read a few different ways, but I read it as an aging man amazed by modernity but also kind of frightened by it, and comforting his loved one with: These are the days of miracle and wonder, and don’t cry baby, don’t cry, don’t cry If these are ̶...
We mourn our craft
I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it. I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production. And yet here we are. The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you...
15 years of blogging
My first blog post was published just under 15 years ago in March of 2011. Since then, I’ve published 151 posts, including this one. (If I was a numerologist, I’d think it had something to do with Pokémon.) This blog has covered a wide variety of topics, including Pokémon in fact (I wrote the first Pokédex app for Android). The topics largely followed the trajectory of my career: starting with machine learning, veering into Android, taking a detour into Solr/Lucene, and eventually se...
Building a browser API in one shot
TL;DR: With one prompt, I built an implementation of IndexedDB using Claude Code and a Ralph loop, passing 95% of a targeted subset of the Web Platform Tests, and 77.4% of a more rigorous subset of tests. When I learned that two simple browser engines had been vibe-coded, I was not particularly surprised. A browser engine is a well-understood problem with multiple independent implementations, whose codebases have no doubt been slurped up into LLM training data. What did surprise me is that neith...
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If you care about web performance and want opinions backed by actual benchmarks instead of vibes, Nolan's blog is one of the best on the internet.