Leon Brocard

Orange HTTP Hacker. Principal Solutions Architect at Fastly.

Interests: [#web](https://fosstodon.org/tags/web ) [#webPerf](https://fosstodon.org/tags/webPerf )
Website: https://www.astray.com/
GitHub: https://github.com/acme

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nprofile1qqswlychvz0cplya4csaguhkc3ypjmkjfnj7x8gawxa7dgpfmg3krjspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsj6jead

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nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-08-05 09:57:51 GMT

I never thought I'd be so happy to see a little drizzle. First rain in a month in London.

2026-07-18 09:36:49 GMT

Gee thanks Gatwick airport for removing the seats in the only calm part of North Terminal

2026-06-15 16:19:23 GMT

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For my kids, in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned-for-under-16s-in-landmark-government-move-to-givekids-their-childhood-back

2026-06-15 15:37:46 GMT

Guess how my under-16 old found out about “Social media to be banned for under-16s”

2026-05-02 10:18:16 GMT

The new stable version of rclone (a command-line program to manage files on cloud storage) is out, including a few of my contributions: https://rclone.org/changelog/#v1-74-0-2026-05-01
#rclone

2026-05-01 07:17:25 GMT

At the moment all I seem to do is write compilers

2026-04-29 07:27:52 GMT

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Could you make the link clickable please?

2026-04-28 20:25:54 GMT

Now it’s warmer I’ve started cycling to work. Coincidentally, all my muscles now ache and I’m exhausted.

2026-04-26 16:47:06 GMT

I kinda want to replace my old Synology NAS, but the hardware and drive prices are wild right now.

2026-04-24 18:16:48 GMT

It must be friday: Protocol "ttps" not supported

2026-04-22 17:33:38 GMT

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Oh my, given my nick, gotta see this!

2026-04-19 18:35:54 GMT

"The site is unusually friendly to markdown-native browsing agents"

2026-04-11 13:38:54 GMT

I have a number of Markdown files, and recently I have realised that Obsidian is pretty good at viewing them, searching them and even treating them like a database Bases. (I know, I'm late to the party). What other Obsidian features should I be aware of?
#obsidian

2026-04-08 14:10:22 GMT

Web Performance advice changes over time:
Web Performance Tuning by Patrick Killelea (1998) recommends pre-starting Java in Netscape, 68K emulation for the Macintosh, and whether to get an internal or external modem.
High Performance Web Sites, by Steve Souders (2007) recommends CSS sprites, how to configure mod_gzip, and mentions CGI scripts.
What advice will raise eyebrows in 2030?
#webperf

2026-04-08 05:57:23 GMT

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:ac_music: The internet is really really great :ac_music:

2026-03-22 20:28:11 GMT

"0Gbps NVMe Enclosure" sounds very impressive. Maybe some digits are missing.

2026-03-15 09:29:34 GMT

Benchmarking a new rclone backend on my laptop is tricky. First run, 18 seconds! Second run, 35 seconds because now it's throttling and trying to keep cool.

2026-03-08 16:08:41 GMT

I'm setting up a server which is IPv6 only... and it can't connect to GitHub? In 2026?

2026-03-05 20:48:24 GMT

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We need a leaderboard of trust

2026-03-04 10:50:57 GMT

In Ruby 4.0.0, the "CGI library is removed from the default gems"
End of an era!

2026-03-03 13:31:10 GMT

I need to compact my memory. I'm just resting my eyes. On the sofa. In the sun. Mmm.

2026-03-03 06:55:52 GMT

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Love the glitch art

2026-02-28 09:22:56 GMT

Looking forward to the State of the Browser conference today, in the maze that is Barbican. Always good to share modern web, accessibility and web standards. See you there! #sotb #sotb26

2026-02-22 16:11:21 GMT

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I guess that eventually we'll settle on USB-C headphones? Or Bluetooh everything?

2026-02-22 16:10:11 GMT

Remember when all our digital devices had headphone jacks? Now I have to worry about dongles and batteries instead, sigh.

2026-02-22 13:28:24 GMT

Oops accidentally in Chinatown for dumplings surrounded by lanterns, firecrackers going off and dancing lions. Sneaked in for tasty dim sum. Happy new year!

2026-02-12 16:51:33 GMT

Recently, I dove into the language server protocol and contributed to the Falco VCL parser. Mostly so I could produce a TON of GIFs showing off the new functionality of my VS Code extension for Fastly VCL: https://www.fastly.com/blog/bringing-full-vcl-language-support-to-visual
Who knew editors had all these features?

2026-02-11 06:45:45 GMT

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Nice! I’ve recently had success with agents building a marimo notebook, which seems similar to Showboat. It’s lightweight, really just some python code, and can show the output of commands/tables/charts.

2026-02-06 21:04:58 GMT

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FOUR!!4!

2026-02-04 08:35:11 GMT

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I omitted the zero case to make the chart more readable

2026-02-04 07:54:39 GMT

Modern websites depend on many third party assets in a blocking way… which might affect their availability. I queried the HTTP Archive and crafted some pretty charts for https://www.fastly.com/blog/resilience-in-the-age-of-third-party-dependencies #http
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/116/011/278/041/994/504/original/d113cdb517e6b30c.png

2026-01-31 07:14:16 GMT

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Love the name

2026-01-30 11:40:38 GMT

I'm super not impressed by blog posts which are obviously not written by a real person

2026-01-27 13:43:38 GMT

I love that Firefox is planning to ship Compression Dictionary Transport with Firefox 149. You can test it in the nightly.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2003541
#http

2026-01-27 11:32:38 GMT

Currently I have five different web browsers open. This is a normal number of browsers to have, right?

2026-01-26 07:17:07 GMT

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It’s always been terrible and changed over the years, but never improved

2026-01-23 07:42:29 GMT

The game has loaded, please stop the tape

2026-01-21 07:48:33 GMT

How do you measure the real end-to-end latency of your website in a light-weight way? I investigate the Server-Timing HTTP header and query the HTTP Archive to see how sites across the web use it: https://www.fastly.com/blog/lightweight-latency-measurement-with-server-timing
#http #webPerf

2026-01-21 07:10:59 GMT

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“pokaimon’”

2026-01-19 14:19:52 GMT

Bah, JavaScript doesn't have a BigUint128Array

2026-01-15 11:38:44 GMT

I use hurl for testing HTTP servers, it's great. Today, I wanted to add a feature to access the raw response bytes... only to find that the next version will have it: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/pull/4669

2026-01-14 10:46:04 GMT

"referer: Unknown word". That spelling is used enough times by software on my computer, it must be the real spelling by now.

2026-01-13 15:40:55 GMT

"strftime": Unknown word. Well, yes, not the best name.

2026-01-12 11:48:21 GMT

"user-defined submarines"

2026-01-12 11:24:10 GMT

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Too many rrrrrrr

2026-01-12 10:14:39 GMT

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Oh no it's worse than that, I typoed "error"

2026-01-12 09:59:33 GMT

I had an error in my docs: I typed "error"

2026-01-10 09:31:55 GMT

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I made it more pixelly
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/115/870/102/934/248/717/original/1b94e3fa2dae4f02.png

2026-01-10 09:13:36 GMT

Remember when we could see pixels?

2026-01-09 19:02:04 GMT

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I’m not sure that ranking data has improved in quality in the past decades

2026-01-07 12:42:00 GMT

It's pretty impressive how much work a code editor is doing behind the scenes, calling language servers

2026-01-06 14:25:54 GMT

"This is actually reasonable behavior"

2026-01-05 19:12:40 GMT

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All browsers support it https://caniuse.com/http3 and a large percentage of servers do too: https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-the-web#h3

2026-01-04 20:19:49 GMT

Oh no, I accidentally read online comments

2026-01-01 03:06:50 GMT

Not excited that the “smart” lamp in my hotel room decided to turn on to its brightest setting at 06:00 on the first of January

2025-12-25 06:07:52 GMT

Happy underwater Santa day. It me.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/115/778/707/167/012/834/original/0926bb9f8e946a45.jpeg

2025-12-19 16:49:09 GMT

Silly project for the week has been generating kennings (old english figurative compound terms) for Pokemon, and displaying them on a Pimoroni Presto
#pimoroni #pokemon
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/115/747/247/464/808/814/original/ed6006df11eed09e.png

2025-12-19 07:17:25 GMT

“Advancing the cyber frontier”

2025-12-17 11:07:34 GMT

I bet you people inadvertently include test files, build artifacts, and development scripts inside editor plugins like Visual Studio Code extensions. Anyone investigated?

2025-12-13 09:12:02 GMT

I've been trying Python notebook alternatives and I quite like https://marimo.io/. It's clean and the files are just Python. Anything else I should look at?

2025-12-13 09:10:20 GMT

I love it when I notice /ftp/ in a path on the web. A nice stable URL ;-)

2025-12-12 07:50:18 GMT

This website hates the web and its users, because it won’t let me view the content I came for in landscape mode
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/115/705/500/009/514/910/original/5db761fbb9508a79.jpeg

2025-12-10 16:27:08 GMT

Oh no, I've been paying domain fees for 26 years for a throwaway joke domain

2025-12-10 14:49:49 GMT

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Metrics also have descriptions. The most common are:
image
HIT
bur
dca
US
396982
Many providers use three-letter airport codes to identify their datacenters. The last one is an ASN.
Other interesting values:
%!d(string=tracker)
00000000-0000-0000-5000-000000000000
1
application/javascript
inactive
STALE
UNCACHEABLE
us-east-1
variants
width=1920

2025-12-10 12:18:13 GMT

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Metrics have names. Here are some odd ones that I found:
actually-load-product-groups
ALL_SERVER
CHECK-IF-SPECS-EXIST
for_you_enrich_comments_offset
getRamProperties
getToast
grape_key
iron_gate_lock
is_disabled_globally
lighthouse-operations
lion
load-product-groups-to-load
lunar-data
mid-OfflineMiddleWare
mw-hotness-cold
NOCACHE
not_red
overhead
pause_per_write
pet
piano
prolog
query-total-lara
retrieve-cats
SauronOverallTimer
SELECT_FROM_sites
spicedb_filter
terminator_rt
undefined
vanilla

2025-12-10 11:53:26 GMT

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Server-Timing "enables a server to communicate performance metrics about the request-response cycle to the user agent".

2025-12-10 11:51:41 GMT

So who wants to know about funny Server-Timing metrics?
#webperf

2025-12-09 09:40:14 GMT

Good news, my daughter is learning binary

2025-12-08 14:21:58 GMT

I love instantly loading websites and I'm impressed by @fabkru.bsky.social's deep dive into how Speed Kit achieve this, including always compressing with Compression Dictionaries: https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/web-performance-2025-the-shift-from-optimization-to-prediction/
#webPerf

2025-12-03 09:23:27 GMT

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I’m doing that, except it’s tea. Much more relaxing than computers.

2025-11-26 16:14:43 GMT

I appreciate how Mastodon works on dodgy train Wi-Fi, while most of the web does not

2025-11-24 21:26:13 GMT

But how do tools find the “Tool Search Tool”?

2025-11-24 10:37:23 GMT

The font used by the new https://www.eurovision.com/ site is called "Singing Sans" #eurovision

2025-11-22 18:29:13 GMT

I don’t realise that the London Perl & Raku Workshop 2025 is next week. Anyone going? #perl http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2025/

2025-11-21 14:22:22 GMT

Overheard at home: “computers are okay sometimes”

2025-11-19 16:39:17 GMT

"Planning an event? This hotel has facilities measuring 0 square feet (0 square meters), including conference space" is a good example of how high quality data is important

2025-11-18 16:34:02 GMT

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Yes!

2025-11-17 21:30:45 GMT

I have a multimeter. Let the probing begin!

2025-11-17 15:52:40 GMT

:EMOJICODE:

2025-11-17 13:21:34 GMT

"You might want to add dependabot[bot] to the contributors list if you want to acknowledge automated contributions"

2025-11-13 20:22:57 GMT

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Micro pigs?

2025-11-13 14:28:55 GMT

Most of the time, you want lossy WebP, not lossless WebP

2025-11-13 11:44:41 GMT

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I’m a fan of Pis for small displays, mostly because I’m happier coding on more powerful computers

2025-11-11 16:08:04 GMT

My afternoon:
It can't possibly be a browser bug,
It can't possibly be a browser bug,
Oh, it's a browser bug.

2025-11-11 13:57:54 GMT

net::ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED

2025-11-07 08:57:44 GMT

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It's a new API, only supported by Chrome right now, but for the right type of site it can make page navigations instant. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Speculation_Rules_API and https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/implementing-speculation-rules have good summaries.

2025-11-07 08:11:55 GMT

I didn't realise that I would have to modify my Content Security Policy when adding support for the Speculation Rules API #webperf

2025-11-06 08:19:39 GMT

One of the caveats of the Core Web Vitals metrics they excluded all Safari users (on iOS, iPadOS, visionOS, and MacOS). I'm excited that the new Safari 26.2 Beta adds support for collecting the Largest Contentful Paint metric. This should give us a wider view of real user performance.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-notes/safari-26_2-release-notes
#webperf

2025-11-06 08:08:51 GMT

It was great to meet everyone at performance.now() in Amsterdam last week. Also Stroopwafel.
#perfnow

2025-11-06 07:02:58 GMT

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I’m excited about LCP

2025-11-04 10:36:38 GMT

Maybe, just maybe, your static website doesn't need 5 MB of JavaScript

2025-11-02 12:27:13 GMT

Anyone have trustworthy stats for typical browser resolutions? #webperf

2025-11-01 07:11:03 GMT

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The two days were great, thanks

2025-10-31 09:40:07 GMT

The most optimistic take on the future of the web at #perfnow is that we should make the web more delightful

2025-10-29 16:23:06 GMT

My “smart” hotel can’t issue keycards because of Azure issues

2025-10-29 14:42:22 GMT

Yay on a Eurostar train to Amsterdam for #perfnow. I’m wearing a red Fastly hoodie. Come say hi!

2025-10-28 08:58:04 GMT

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There’s also some bits of history to see

2025-10-28 08:26:05 GMT

Did I mention that I travelled to Berlin and ate lots of currywurst?

2025-10-27 07:44:26 GMT

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A fast enough compiler seems like an interpreter?

2025-10-26 16:10:09 GMT

I appreciate the backup plan in https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/26/internet-infrastructure-fragile-system-holding-modern-world-together
“In the UK, there is a non-virtual contingency plan, or at least there was. If the internet shuts down, the people who know how it works will meet up in a pub outside London and decide what to do”.
Have another round, I suspect, would be item 1 on the agenda.