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šŸ„§ Pie mail - Lessons from my three year old about core web vitals šŸ„§

Published almost 3 years agoĀ ā€¢Ā 4 min read

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Hi everybody, it's pie-mail time again!

I turned forty last week! I celebrated the occasion by creating my very first production incident at the new job. It was a fun time!

I heard you should start your forties as you intend to continue, so, I guess I'm setting a pattern!

I'm not too old to learn new things though, as you'll find out below. Enjoy the latest newsletter, and as always, I look forward to hearing your responses!

Enjoy!


šŸŽ“ This week I learned... šŸŽ“

...about core web vitals.

Web vitals are a set of performance indicators from Google. They exist to give guidance on building a better user experience. Core web vitals are what they consider to be the 'most important' of these.

The core web vitals currently are:

  • Largest Contentful Paint
  • First Input Delay
  • Cumulative Layout Shift

Cool, so what does that all mean?

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Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

'Contentful' is a funny word. I take it to mean an element on the page that contains some relevant content. 'Paint', in this context, means rendering an item on screen.

So, Largest Contentful Paint is the time it takes for the largest meaningful item in the viewport - most likely an image or text block - to render on screen. Ideally, they recommend an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less.

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First Input Delay (FID)

First Input Delay is the time taken between a users first interaction with a page, and the browser being able to start processing that interaction.

First Input Delay could be slow when a page appears to be ready to interact with, but is still processing something in the background. For example, if a user clicks a button, but the page is still loading, it might take a while to respond. That's bad.

100 milliseconds or less is the recommended FID score your site should have.

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Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

You ever have that thing where you click a button on a website, but the site is still loading, and the elements shift under you as you're clicking? Annoying right?

That's Layout Shift, the layout of the page changing as it loads. Each element that shifts is given a score, based on how much of the viewport it takes up, and how much it moves. There's math involved in working that out.

Cumulative layout shift is the total of all these calculations. The tl;dr is that you want items to shift around as little as possible - a CLS score of 0.1 or less is recommended.

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You can read more about Core Web Vitals at web.dev.

The cool thing is, you can measure these things. Some of them you can use Google Lighthouse, or, there's a web-vitals JavaScript library that will spit out these numbers for you. Nice!

Finally, Core Web Vitals as taught by my three year old:

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āœØ Some interesting links āœØ

Boeing recommend turning their 787s off and on again

Our friends at Boeing are doing nothing to curb my deathly fear of flying. One interesting side effect of this bug is that it can stop the planes horn from working. 787s have horns, who knew!

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Julia Evans comics

I'm a big fan of Julia Evans. She publishes a lot of comics about tech on Twitter, and now has made all of that content available in one place. Read and enjoy!

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Heuristics applied opening a safe lock

Maria Kedemo tells a story about using heuristics to break into one of her kids toys. It's a great explanation of how we use heuristics in every day life, and what they mean in testing.

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URL Lengthener

Are you tired of short URLs? Want to make your URL much much longer? URL Lengthener is the app for you!

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šŸ§© Puzzle time šŸ§©

I tried to log in to my old lynda.com account today, but couldn't remember what email address I used.

When I attempt to log in with an invalid email, it gives me an HTTP code I don't recognise.

Head over to the log in page and try it for yourself.

Can you see what code it is returning? What does that code mean? What code should it return?


šŸŽŖ Events coming up šŸŽŖ

Events for those of you in New Zealand:

Change-making at TalkCode Tauranga (May 18, Tauranga)

Amit Kamble, Izzy Joe and Josh Biddick share their stories about making changes in their various organisations. Should be fun!

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So you want to become a UX Designer (May 20, Auckland)

Not directly testing related, but I'm sure the content and advice in this will be great. UX Designer Bear Liu will be talking about his career, and how he mapped it out, and how you can do the same.

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Opportunity Mapping Workshop (May 26, Auckland)

Startup Grind are hosting Katherine Barrow and Craig Boxall from Sprint Zero, for a workshop on Opportunity Mapping! Head along and learn all about how to prioritise and build a product roadmap!

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Tech Week NZ (May 22 - 30, all over NZ)

There's a boatload of stuff happening for Tech Week in NZ. Check out the agenda, there's bound to be something for you!

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Events for anyone anywhere!

Front End Test Fest (8 June):

ā€‹A free front end testing conference from Cypress and Applitools. Angie Jones, Kent C. Dodds, Kristin Jackvony and Cassidy Williams all at the same event? You bet I'm in. You should be too!

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TestBash Home (June 17-18):

I've mentioned it before, but, the lineup for TestBash Home has just been announced. There are so many of my favourite bloggers and speakers at this one! I'm most looking forward to:

  • Too Many Bugs in Production - What Are We Going To Do? from Melissa Fisher
  • How Can You Contribute to Automation If You Don't Know How to Write Code? from Luke Liu
  • Maaike Brinkof's talk (the title is sweary so I don't want to include it in email, spam filters and that)
  • Gatekeeper to Enabler: 5 Steps to Make QA the Darling of Your Company - Erika Chestnut

There's a bunch more stuff on top of all that, including social stuff, discussions, AMAs and more. Don't miss it!

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šŸ‘‹ Thanks for reading! šŸ‘‹

You've made it this far through the email? You're awesome.

Have an amazing week, and reach out to me any time on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Cheers,

James a.k.a. JPie šŸ„§

ā€‹https://jpie.nzā€‹

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