Thomas Fuchs
Hi, I'm Thomas Fuchs. I'm the author of Zepto.js, of script.aculo.us, and I'm a Ruby on Rails core alumnus. With Amy Hoy I'm building cheerful software, like Noko Time Tracking and Every Time Zone and write books like Retinafy.me.
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6 easy things you can do to improve your JavaScript runtime performance

November 8th, 2009

Here are the slides from my “Extreme JavaScript Performance” talk that I gave at JSConf.eu on November 7 in Berlin.

I’m talking about 6 easy things you can do to improve your JavaScript runtime performance, ranging from simple things (function inlining) to some quite surprising findings on how JavaScript engines deal with loops.

View more documents from Thomas Fuchs.

There’s benchmarks for the four most common JavaScript engines, SpiderMonkey (Firefox 3.5), JavaScriptCore (Safari 4), JScript (Internet Explorer 8) and V8 (Google Chrome).

Be cautious however! Only do these optimizations if you have to, and, please, for the love of all the JavaScript gods, do not, ever, optimize prematurely. 🙂

Finally, here’s a PDF (750k) of the slides, if you want to read it offline and/or in dead tree form, and there’s a Github Gist of the example code, so you can run it yourself.

I welcome any comments, and findings you might have had with optimizing your JavaScript code.

Homework! Interface Design Basics for Developers

October 10th, 2009

Here’s an awesome presentation on Interface Design Basics from Samo KoroÅ¡ec.

Some good reading and thinking material for the weekend! 🙂 And maybe helps to make the web a little bit more use- and beautiful!

Ruby on Rails Introduction

July 6th, 2009

Here are the slides from a 3-hour tutorial/presentation I gave at a local university last year. (As it’s an introduction to both Ruby and Rails basics it’s still current!). It shows off some of the nice concepts in Ruby and in Rails, and actually has some code on slides which I’m a big fan of.

You can grab the Ruby sample code here and/or download the slides as PDF (18.8 MB).

BTW, if you’re on the east coast, there’ll be awesome Ruby and Rails courses starting in August tought by our friend Jeff Casimir, so drop by Jumpstart Lab and register for one!

Slides from Web app/JavaScript performance talk at Kings of Code

July 3rd, 2009

Here are the slides from the presentation Amy and I gave at Kings of Code ’09 in Amsterdam. Probably not too helpful without the audio, it’s mostly for those of you that attended and asked for the slides, so please enjoy Rich and Snappy Apps (No Scaling Required).

You can also grab a PDF (3.4 MB).

Slides from SXSW JavaScript Panel

March 13th, 2008

Head over to John Resigs blog post for more information! And thanks for the positive feedback we’ve received!