The numerous roundtrips involved in downloading a page hit performance hard, but the new ‘preconnect hint’ in Firefox 39 and Chrome 46 lets you tell the browser up front about what connections you will need.

Emulating network connectivity via Chrome’s DevTools has been possible for a while, but now you can create your own throttling profiles (in Canary only for now).

While it claims to offer pings and similar checks from tens of thousands of locations, just seeing numerous ping times on a map is quite satisfying.

Learn to use JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) in your Java apps for secure authentication, authorization and cryptography without any OAuth headaches. You’ll finish with a working sample app and a deep understanding of token-based auth.

Who’s using Content-Security-Policy, X-XSS-Protection, and similar headers? Quite few major sites it seems.

A handy script and walkthrough of quickly rolling out self signed certificates and using them for in-house development.

Getting your head around what ‘microtasks’ are and how browsers queue execution of tasks and microtasks in its event loops is essential if you’re doing performance work.

“Load server calibration is an iterative process to accurately determine the appropriate number of virtual users to run from each load server.”

If your CSS has been cached somewhere and you really need it to update, there are a few strategies.

Inlining ‘critical’ CSS (that is, CSS that’s needed right away and helps pages render faster) into the head of an HTML document can provide a real speed boost, but how can it be done effectively? Dean Hume explains.