A Few Small Repairs

Lisa wondered the other day if the people who read my blog can intuit my mood from how much or little I write, her thesis being that if I post a lot, I must be in need of diversion, which must signal something. Whether or not this can be intuited by the readership beyond Lisa, she’s not altogether wrong: writing here serves many roles. It’s a place to stick my head when I need a break from the tizzy of everyday life, it’s a place to go when I simply need space to be alone with my thoughts, it’s a way to exercise control when other things seem beyond my control.

I clearly needed some distracting this week, as evidenced by the maintenance work I’ve done here on the blog over the last couple of days. Which variant of disappearance into the cave this was, I’m not completely sure: part of it was being left to my own devices for a few days, here by the shore, and being unable to settle into complete summertime idyll; part of me needed some respite from writing weighty words; and there’s a longer-standing part of me that takes comfort from, well, optimization.

It’s optimization that I was focused on this week, and I made a few small repairs in that regard, under the hood, which I’m listing here as much to remind myself as anything else:

• I replaced the Drupal theme, which was a sub-theme of Claro, with a much more minimal custom theme, one that recreated the aesthetics but stripped out everything that wasn’t needed (Claro is a Drupal admin-focused theme, and so it had a lot of superfluous cruft that wasn’t required here).
• I added responsive image delivery, so that those on mobile get smaller mobile-optimized images, and added lazy-loading of images. These were a big win for making the site nimble.
• I started serving the site with HTTP/2. This was an easy win—one configuration change in my Apache setup—that also provided a big speed payoff.
• I turned on both CSS and JavaScript aggregation in Drupal.
• I turned on Brotli compression for Apache.

The result of all these changes was that I increased my Core Web Vitals score from 57 to 92, and reduced my Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) from 7.5 seconds to 2.9 seconds.

All of these things are standard issue Drupal and Apache optimizations, the kind of thing that I spent more than a quarter century steeped in when I was maintaining Drupal for Almanac.com.

Which prompts me to consider another reason that I escape into this sort of work from time to time: I miss it. I derived a good part of my identity from being a professional optimizer: that was the work that lay at the heart of my career. Giving that up, at the end of 2023, has left me to reinvent myself. Like a pilot who hangs up their wings, sometimes I just need to remember what it’s like to fly.

(Credit to Shawn Colvin for the post title. Her A Few Small Repairs is a masterwork.)