Plurrrr

I’ve been writing about performance for a long time. I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at it, but sometimes I look back on my older blog posts and cringe at the mistakes I made.

This post is an attempt to distill some of what I’ve learned over the years to offer as advice to other aspiring tinkerers, benchmarkers, and anyone curious about how browsers actually work when you put them to the test.

Writing functional code is often backwards and can feel more like solving puzzles than like explaining a process to the computer. In functional languages I often know what I want to say, but it feels like I have to solve a puzzle in order to express it to the language. Functional programming is just a bit too weird.

In my humble opinion, the best websites and web applications have a tangible “real” quality to them. There are lots of factors involved to achieve this quality, but shadows are a critical ingredient.

When I look around the web, though, it's clear that most shadows aren't as rich as they could be. The web is covered in fuzzy grey boxes that don't really look much like shadows.

In this tutorial, we'll learn how to transform typical box-shadows into beautiful, life-like ones.