I stumbled upon a new (to me) acronym the other day: e18e. Thanks to Google, I now know that e18e stands for Ecosystem Performance, and is a movement to Cleanup, Speedup, Levelup. One [JS] package at a time. Nice! Anything that makes things more efficient is alright by me! With three main areas of focus, perhaps there is something that will pique your interest?

1. cleanup – cleaning up dependency trees and modernizing popular tools and libraries across the ecosystem.
2. speedup – speeding up parts of the ecosystem many of us depend on.
3. levelup – documenting and providing modern, lighter alternatives to established tools and libraries we all regularly use.

I have shared several advent-style sites (in fact, lists of them!), but here is an advent year of sorts: Emiliano Pisu has published An Awesome CSS Link a Day for 347 days straight, and counting! Incredible, such golden nuggets peppered throughout! Grab a hot bevvie and proceed to read…

Speaking of advents, after a recent article from the Web Performance Calendar, How to load CSS (fast), by Yoav Weiss, Erwin Hofman seems to have been inspired to implement Compression Dictionaries on the RUMVision website, resulting in HTML transfersize savings: 45.5% and promises of more to come… Wow. In the comments, Erwin lists a few resources that should be helpful, if you too are so inspired; in addition to those listed above, Erwin also lists:

• Getting Real (small) With Compression Dictionaries, by Patrick Meenan
• Compression Dictionary Transport, via MDN
• Patrick’s presentation from performance.now() 2023 (YouTube)

An investigation I have been meaning to undertake, was at least partially undertaken by Morgan Murrah in his RUM for a small race-car website: Trying out SpeedCurve, RUMvision, mPulse article. Good high-level take on those three monitoring services. Morgan was focusing specifically on RUM services, but I am also interested in synthetics, including Catchpoint, DebugBear, and New Relic, so I might still do my own some day.

With the deceptively-simple title of 30 Years of <br> Tags, Christoffer Artmann writes a wonderfully in-depth walk through Three decades of making things on the internet, touching everything us old-timers have gone through since our earliest days on the web…

Russ Rowlett, a now-retired Adjunct Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Education at UNC, maintains The Lighthouse Directory, which provides information and links for more than 24,600 of the world’s lighthouses… I have always had a passion for lighthouses. A couple lifetimes ago, when I thought I was going to be an architect, I actually designed my future home as one… Maybe someday, but for now, I will just sit and scroll/click through Russ’ collection…

I have yet to completely jump off the AI cliff. I have tried, multiple times, but haven’t yet had my “breakthrough” moment. Thus far, everything I ask it to do feels like the prompt takes as long as it would have taken me to just code it myself, and in the latter case, I already know what I wrote, so don’t need to learn what the AI wrote, and proof it… But I feel confidently that if anyone can find a way to get me into it, Addy Osmani could manage it, so I will diligently read My LLM coding workflow going into 2026, where he shares his Best practices for staying in control while coding with AI… Let’s see…

And then I face-plant into an article like Anil Dash‘s The Majority AI View, where he sums up the opinions he hears when speaking with people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry, like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use as:

Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.

Edwin Molina Hernández, of Web Performance Report fame, shares his year-long collection of web performance links. Handy!

Suren Enfiajyan shares Some features that every JavaScript developer should know in 2025. From Iterators to structuredClone() to WeakSet to WeakMap and more.

Speaking of performance and JavaScript, Michal Matuška shares advancements in INP optimization in React 19.2. Nice to hear, hope these help make React sites a little more user-friendly.

Sticking with React (and the Web Performance Calendar), Nadia Makarevich introduces us to Performance of React Server Components. Dropping LCP from 4.1s to 1.61s is certainly impressive! Sad to see users still waiting 2s+ for interactivity, but as Nadia says, the only way to improve that is by reducing the amount of JavaScript the users have to download during the first run… :-?

The great Scott Jehl recently presented Web Components Can’t Save Us. (But You Can!) (YouTube) at a NY Web Performance Meetup. He has also made his slides available.

And finally, wrapping up this tumultuous year with The best science images of 2025, via Nature.com. Absolutely gorgeous snapshots, capturing the stunning brilliance of the universe around us, and the absolutely inspiring skill and talent of those wielding the cameras…

Happy reading,
Atg

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