Interestingly this blog has basically morphed into a personal blog. But since I know a lot about software and productivity, those are the main topics I’m writing about for the foreseeable future:
- mindset, knowledge, productivity hacks
- high performance software
- compression
- performance testing tools
- tools to help improve performance
You can follow new essays on this blog either my twitter SpeedTestDemon, or via my email list.
I first started writing on this blog since May 2021 — mainly to rant about the crazy things I found in such a mundane topic as CDN performance. Since then this blog has actually picked up a few thousand readers! Isn’t that nice. Well, I like talking to people, so you can drop me a tweet at my twitter @SpeedTestDemon.
To help you navigate this blog, right now there is primarily one section “CDNs” which is like a table of contents. It has organized the links to all the different writings I’ve put up regarding CDNs. For future topics, I will put up more sections.
If there’s anything on this blog that you think is not credited appropriately, please contact me so I can correct it.
What I’m Blogging About Right Now
Right now, I’m currently doing this series of speed tests on “free” CDNs. Long story short is some “free” CDNs are actually really impressive! But some free CDNs are not even close to premium CDNs. And I’m doing the series to investigate. It’s not that simple.
Speed testing CDNs has turned out to be way more interesting than I thought. I thought it was going to be an open-and-shut case — you just run a curl on the same file against two CDNs, you have a clear winner, bing bang boom done.
Topics I’m thinking about blogging about in the future
- processor speed tests, running on real world workloads like compiling large C++, Rust, or common npm scripts. Particularly on the M1 chip, which is so cool.
- Shared hosting speed tests. Hosting providers “cheat” by putting hundreds of the same website on the same virtual private server. All of them do, or else it’s not economically viable to rent out “unlimited” WordPress servers at $2/month (Namecheap does this, I was mind-boggled when I saw that offer). So the question is, which hosting provider “cheats” more than other providers?
- DNS lookup speeds.
- Browser speed tests.
- Webassembly speed tests.
- Link shorteners redirect speed. Link shorteners are used often for ads. Any delay is literally money, easily hundreds of dollars. So it is crucial that they redirect as quickly as possible.
Chess Bio
If you stumbled on to my chess content and wondered what the heck does this guy know about chess, well here you go:
- Was contemporaries with popular streamers International Master (IM) Eric Rosen and IM Kassa Korley and beat both in long, serious time control (not blitz or bullet). To be fair, was MANY years ago, were very different people. Feels like a different life.
- Met and played IM Marc Esserman at Harvard Square, where he gave me an extra queen and I still lost (to be fair, I was already a couple years retired from chess 😅). And then he tried to sell me his Smith-Morra book
- Played the game for 10+ years
- Read hundreds of chess books, including supposedly advanced content by Dvoretsky.
- Quit around National Master (NM) rank because I hated the “chase for rating points”.
- Used to be extremely addicted to bughouse and crazyhouse because that was more fun, until I learned the Turing Technique, the fastest way to get better at chess — or for that matter, any game that computers have mastered.
- Played bughouse and crazyhouse to Grandmaster (GM) levels. I fully regret every minute
Contact Details & About me
I’m currently a software engineer at a Silicon Valley company, but in my spare time on nights and weekends I like to pretend I’m Tony Stark in his laboratory hacking on cool stuff.
If you wish to email directly instead of twitter, you can email me hello \at/ speedtestdemon \dot/ com.
Thanks for visiting my blog.
The SpeedTestDemon.