About Sessions

Cloning Medium

Beekey was looking into whether blog content could help developers network with each other. Comments have been used for decades, but are not a great venue for intellectual discourse or building relationships.

While trying to decide how to best tackle this problem, the core component for a blog publishing platform was built as a base for running experiments.

Participants

Beekey Cheung
LinkedIn Eight One Books
Jon Moshier
LinkedIn
Leo Guinan
LinkedIn Leo Guinan AI
Stella Miranda
LinkedIn
Nick Pompa
LinkedIn

Summary

The focus on this presentation was around being able to deliver an article in a performant manner with lots of JS to provide functionality.

Typically, the more Javascript required to deliver a page, the worse that page performs. Look at the Google Lighthouse report for Medium:

lighthouse report of a medium article showing a performance score of 42

The project published articles as static HTML pages delivered via S3 + Cloudfront and with asynchronously loaded web components to improve performance:

lighthouse report of a static site showing a performance score of 96

The main downside of static HTML pages is the need to migrate every article when the template is changed (e.g. a new web component is added).

Group discussion involved:

  • Using Next.js with AWS Lambda to achieve similar performance, but without the need for migrations
  • Taking performance hits in general for developer speed
  • General management of software infrastructure
  • The long going trend of infrastructure products/services charging a percentage of the total AWS bill

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