I disagree that the web site is fast; it took at least 10 seconds before the video would start playing.
McMaster Carr is the greatest site ever. I could browse forever
I use the site daily. Being able to download FREE CAD models in one click, nominal dimensions for nearly everything, and linked compatible components makes design so much simpler. I can swap a screw out in my assemblies in seconds. Other online hardware catalogs just don't compare. It's the perfect first draft resource.
If McMaster ever goes down it's going to take twice as long to do any design.
TL:DW Magic
Nah, a lot of old tech. I used to work on shit like this... loading all your images (including the fucking rounded corners for IE) into a sprite... setting up caching, using prefetching and inlined CSS/JS for critical path stuff.
There was a whole industry around web performance in the days that a customer might be trying to download your site over their 256 kbps connection.
It's neat tech and I miss fiddling with it. I honestly found it a lot more fulfilling than the SPA era of web design.
See: The Website Obesity Crisis.
The author links their tweet saying "your website should not exceed in file size the major works of Russian literature." At the time, that page on Twitter was 900 KB. Today it is 11 MB.
Dooope
