Differential Serving on Firebase Hosting (and moving to Medium)

Polymer 2.x/3.x brought the standards-compliant ES6 class-based syntax for defining Web Components. This works well for most modern browsers and ES6 has a lot of other nice features (like arrow functions) to make your JS code cleaner and more fun to write.

But if you need to support older browsers like IE 11 you will have to compile your code to ES5 which comes with performance drawbacks for modern browsers compared to running ES6 on them directly.

The ideal approach is to use differential serving to serve the ES6 version to modern browsers and a fallback ES5 version to older browser. prpl-server-node is a sample implementation of a Node server that uses this pattern. I took the ideas from this implementation and created a sample based on the polymer-starter-kit on how you can use differential serving on Firebase Hosting using Cloud Functions for Firebase for dynamically sending the right version to the user.

Since blogger has started to look quite old I'm currently testing Medium, so you will find the rest of this article there: https://medium.com/@scarygami/differential-serving-on-firebase-hosting-f83c33b83a8e

Polymer Summit 2017

The Polymer Summit 2017 in Copenhagen was over far too quick. It was a great and fun event with a lot of inspiring talks and interesting conversations in the breaks and during the after party.

In this post I will try to summarize my highlights and takeaways from this summit. There are also a couple of links that go into deeper details for the various topics, and I will be exploring some of those topics more closely in the future, which will most likely result in more articles.

Polymer in Production / Part 2 - Building, bundling, lazy-loading

Continuing from my previous blog post about including web components and Polymer in a huge legacy web application, I want to focus on optimizing the performance of your web app using the Polymer CLI and at least the L part of the PRPL pattern in this post. There are several things you can do to improve the initial load time, even if your app doesn't follow the recommended app shell architecture.

Doing more with your Google Location History

With the discontinuation of the Google Latitude API several years ago some nice third party tools to visualize your location history disappeared, which at that time triggered me to look into what can be done with Google Takeout data. The result was the location_history_json_converter (or latitude_json_converter as it was called back then) which thanks to several contributions from the open source community has turned out to be a rather useful and powerful tool to prepare your takeout data for further manipulation and visualization.
Since I've recently used the tool myself again for a travel report (more about this below) and I never actively promoted or explained the tool, I've decided to put together this blog post to tell you about the tool and some samples of what can be done with it.

Polymer in Production

When I was tasked with including new functionality into an existing, rather big internal web application, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma.

For my own personal projects and several other internal projects I did at work, I have grown to love web-components using Polymer because of the ease of development and the natural way to structure applications into (re-usable) parts.

The existing web application in question had been mainly developed with a once (and still) very popular JavaScript library.

A full rewrite of the application was out of question due to time and budget restraints, but using Polymer would have a lot of benefits for the future as far as testability, maintainability and extensibility are concerned.

In this blog post I will go over some of the things I did and had to consider to make this work.