Recently we had an interesting task at work. The user makes a selection of items and clicks a button. Then for every selected item we have to make a request to our API. The thing is that the user may click as many items as he/she wants. In order to speed up the process we decided to handle four requests in parallel and once some of them is finished we pull the next one. If you ask why exactly four requests in parallel read this paper.

The browsers nowadays are smart. They optimize everything and help us to produce better applications. They process our code as fast as possible and even on mobile devices deliver a pleasant experience. However, at the same time, it is possible to write buggy code and make the browser freezing. We are not talking about slowing down the rendering. We are talking about no rendering at all. There are cases where we want so much from the browser that it just can’t handle it.

Today I had to rename a bunch of image files to the same names, but in lower case. Here is how I did it.

Computers are tools that help people accomplish tasks by making the process easier, faster, cheaper, less error-prone, or just more fun. But what tasks? And by what process? What parts of the process can the computer make better? How can users interact with the computer to make it do its part of the process? Only lastly can we ask: what must be presented to the user and how?