The Challenge

In the life cycle of a <much-select> a lot of events are triggered. Events can trigger additional events leading to big cascades of events that can block the main browser thread. We can prevent this from happening with debouncing.

Two example of this in <much-select>:

1. Each keypress when a user is filtering down a list of options. If we debounce keypress events by a half a second or so the UI looks smoother and we do a lot less work.
2. Updating the options in the <much-select> following a relevant DOM change. However, DOM changes can come in in rapid succession. Waiting a 10th of a second or so, for changes to stabilize/finish before updating the options saved a lot of work.

Changes and re-renders in the DOM can be costly. Reducing their frequency significantly improves the responsiveness of <much-select> and enables it to manage larger lists of options more efficiently.

The Problem

A lot of Options

I need <much-select> to support a lot of options. I’ve been testing with 10,000 options. <much-select> needs to be able to filter that list down “fast”. By that I mean it needs to feel fast to the user.

Big Options

The size (or length) of options also plays a role. If the options are fairly simple and short (e.g. city names), that’s a lot different than options with long labels and even longer descriptions (e.g. book titles).

Elm Inside a Web Component

A Whiny Introduction

This is part 1 of a story I never wanted to write. I have heard over and over again something along the lines of, “don’t make a UI widget, leave that to the platform or to someone else.” Those people are right.

What kind of UI widget, you ask? It’s that white whale, a multi-select widget. There are a lot of them out there. If I had spent more time studying the ones that folks have already made, I would probably have been better off, but when you’re doing a project in your spare time (at least it started out that way), just building it is a lot more fun.

This past fall (autumn of 2022), I released my first ever computer game — created for the Crow River Winery’s Corn Maze.

Interested parties can check it out at cr2022.cornmaze.us. However, there isn’t much to do since the game is designed to be played on the actual corn maze. As it’s winter now, the maze is currently closed. Originally I’d planned to create a video explaining how the game works, but as with many aspects of the first iteration of this app, there simply wasn’t enough time.

I’ve missed this post for a couple of years, which is too bad, I need to write more on my blog. I’ve got a whole bunch of draft posts, maybe this year I actually finish them.

Also, in case this is not clear, these are the best books that I managed to read in 2022. I’m sure there are more interesting lists of the best books that came out in 2022.

Matt Gray

A friend of mine, Matt Gray passed away recently. I worked with him for almost 10 years at Clockwork. I have heard many people say that Matt was one of the smartest, kindest, and thoughtful people they knew. I can vouch for all of that.

I learned a lot from Matt. We were basically the same age but for whatever reason he was way ahead of me, when it came to a lot of “professional” skills. And someone I “looked up to”… metaphorically.

This year we’re taking a break from making a Christmas playlist… if ever there was a year to break the norm, amiright?! We fully intend to pick back up this annual tradition in the future but we’ve made 10 playlists with almost 11 hours of Christmas music. So this year, we’ve done our best to put them all together so you can listen all of it (or at least as much as your preferred music streaming service has licensed). We’re enjoying it at the house this year as we log a bit of extra time around the house. We hope you enjoy it, too.

2020 Family Pictures

We don’t post much on social media, for a whole lot of reasons, but we do take a lot of pictures. And, well, 2020 sure is a year to remember! Hahaha… sigh. And despite setting aside a lot of plans, ideals, and normals, all the silver linings and graces of this year are not lost on us. We’re grateful for the ways pandemic days, an unplanned 2.5 months without daycare, and all the time we’ve gotten around home/in our neighborhood have deepened our family rhythms.

Do we promise that all these movies are good? Nope. There’s a bunch we haven’t seen yet… plus you need to bear in mind that our three year old is the litmus for whether a movie makes the cut or not. BUT we made this list for ourselves this year, so we figured we’d share in case an extra movie or two makes sense within your December family rhythms, too. And anything we should add to our list?

I managed to read 1 more book in 2019 than I did in 2018 and I didn’t wait until May to write about them. I feel pretty good about that. But one book different is basically the margin of error with book you start in 1 year and end is the second. It’s interesting look at my GoodReads “My Year in Books”. They give a page count (which is a little strange given I usually listen to audio book, but it’s probably roughly accurate). I have an annual reading habit of about 15-20 books and about 7,000 to 10,000 pages.