40 more maps that explain the world Maps seemed to be everywhere in 2013, a trend I like to think we encouraged along with August's 40 maps that explain the world. Maps can be a remarkably powerful tool for understanding the world and how it works, but they show only what you ask them to. You might consider this, then, a collection of maps meant to inspire your inner map nerd. 1. Data source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, World Bank. Those dots represent people: the brighter the dot, the more people. 2. Click to enlarge. Human beings first left Africa about 60,000 years ago in a series of waves that peopled the globe. 3. (Wikimedia commons) The Mongol conquests are difficult to fathom. 4. Click to enlarge. This map shows the Spanish and Portuguese empires at their height. 5. This map shows British, Dutch and Spanish shipping routes from 1750 to 1800. 6. Click to enlarge. 7. Bluer countries have better income equality. Yes, the United States has worse income inequality than Nigeria. 8. Click to enlarge. 9. 10. 11. 12.
Case study: Analyzing Notion app performance · PerfPerfPerf Web performance isn’t going to save you in this crisis. But if you’re building a software product, chances are you’re relatively unaffected. And in this case, having a quick app is more important than ever. Internet is slowing down due to increased demand, and people are holding on to their phones for longer – so if your app is slow, your users will be affected by it. And slow app means worse business. Today, let’s take a look at Notion – an advanced note-taking web app. Notion shipped tremendous speed enhancements recently, but there’s still a lot of space to improve. Notion is a React web app embedded into a native shell. To be concrete. To understand how the web part is loading, let’s create a public Notion page: and run a WebPageTest audit over it. Sidenote: WebPageTest is an advanced performance testing tool. WebPageTest returns a lot of useful information, but the most interesting part is the loading waterfall: Woah, that’s a lot of info. Here’s what’s going on: You open the page.