Thank you for the HN front page!

Yesterday Web Browser Engineering hit #1 on the front page of Hacker News, the popular programming news site and stayed there for a full day. Thank you, both long-time readers and new subscribers! Part of the reason Chris & I wrote this book is to get a new generation interested in web browser engineering, and it’s always a thrill to see that basic thesis validated.

I suppose while I’m here I might as well relay a funny story. The book’s website is hosted on a Digital Ocean droplet (supported by our wonderful Patreons) for $4/mo. Amazingly, it handled the traffic flood just fine, with CPU usage at around 10–20% when I checked on it. But our log parser GoAccess, which we use to figure out how many visitors the site has, kept getting OOM-killed because the log was too big, so I was keeping track mostly by checking my network usage in the Digital Ocean dashboard.

Today traffic died down and I finally got the log parser running. It looks like about 22,000 people checked out the book, mostly people who’d never visited the site before. That’s a huge number of people getting excited about web browsers! Digging into the data a bit, most visitors of course only looked at the table of contents, but a big fraction started reading the first chapter and a sizable fraction of those presumably finished it and went on to the second.

So, again, hello new readers and a big thank you to long-time fans for supporting this work over the years!

Finally, a quick status update—we’re waiting for a second and hopefully final proof from the publishers, after which printing can start. I’m a little unclear on the exact timeline, but we still hope to have books sent out to people who pre-ordered before the end of the year.