General

Intro to Google DevTools: Network Panel

Published Jun 23, 2020

Updated Feb 14, 2023

5 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

Intro to Google DevTools: Network Panel Today's article will give an overview of the Network panel in Google DevTools. The Network panel allows you to perform a number of cool things. We’ll cover a variety of details on this tab. We’ll start with explaining a bit about the network columns, then move onto talking about filters, following that up with throttling, and finally wrap it up by talking about call details.

Using the Network panel I’ll be using my old D&D site as an example here and navigate the Grand Heroes page. From here we will open up Google DevTools and click on the Network Panel. The panel should currently be empty of any data. We will reload the page with the Network panel open. This will cause data to appear in the panel. The data or resources shown here will be ordered by time of execution. You will also note that the resources are broken up by name, status, type, initiator, size, time and waterfall.

Empty Network panel network1

Resource filled Network panel network2

Network columns As mentioned above the resources are broken up into a few different columns. The name column represents the name of the resource. Status stands for the HTTP response code. Type is the resource type. Initiator represents the cause of the request and by clicking on this it will take you to the code that triggered the request. Size stands for how big the resource is. Time is how long is how long the request took. Finally the waterfall represents the different stages of the request. You can hover over it to see a general breakdown.

Filter The Network panel can usually have a lot of resources shown depending on the site. This is where filtering can come in handy. There are a few different ways to filter in the Network panel. First we’ll start by marking sure we’re on the Grand Heroes page from before and open up the Network panel. We’ll reload the page from here so we can pump the panel full of resources. Now we’ll find the filter options by looking for a text box that says Filter. This option will be found on the second row under the Network panel. Here you can enter information and it will filter the rest out. To the right of this you can see other filter options like XHR, JS, and CSS among many others. By clicking on one it will filter out the other types.

Filter bar network3

Filtering will text-box network4

Filtering by type option network5

Throttling Looking at the column above the filter section we can see a throttling option. Here we can find different throttling items such as No Throttling, Fast 3G, Slow 3G, Offline, and even custom options. This is an amazing tool as it allows you to test how fast your loading time is. With most people having a mobile device and viewing things on the go it’s important to know if your site can load quickly on a mobile device.

Throttling toggle network6

Speaking of mobile devices let us try a Slow 3G throttle. I suspect this page will load fairly slowly.

Slow 3G network7

Well that went about as well as I thought. Originally before the throttling it didn’t annoy me but with throttling it was really slow. The tool shows us that I need to improve the load time of that page. This is great to know and will improve the overall user experience of a site.

Call details We’ll now look into a resource call and see what we can find out. On the Grand Heroes page with the Network panel open we’ll click on the 10 Roll button. This will trigger a new resource to be called and displayed in the Network panel. We’ll click on the resource and click on headers and see all kinds of information.

Headers network8

We can see a few different rows: General, Response Header, Request Headers, and Query String Parameters. These rows have useful information from the Request URL, Request Method, and many others.

Navigating to the Preview tab on the resource gives us the information retrieved from the call. In this case you should see an array of objects.

Preview network9

Conclusion Today's article covered an overview of the Network panel in Google DevTools. Hopefully, after reading this you will have learned something new and useful. I personally find the Network panel to be extremely helpful.

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William Hutt
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7 Tips to be a Successful Developer in a Remote Company

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, most companies were forced to go remote and millions of workers had to learn how to work from home. Two years later, a lot people now prefer the work from home option, and many job seekers are looking for remote-only companies to work for. For software developers, there are many advantages to working from home and still effectively working as a team to produce high quality results. But how can you be successful in a remote company? In this article, I will provide 7 tips on what it takes to be a successful developer in a remote company. Communication is key It is now more important than ever to communicate effectively with your team. Now that everyone is working from home instead of being in one physical office, you have to be very conscious to reach out to teammates and share your progress on a project. In a physical office, you are surrounded by other co-workers all day, which makes it easier to walk over to someone's office and share what you have been working on. It also makes it easier to have impromptu meetings with other team members throughout the day. But in a remote setting, it is very easy to become isolated and get carried away with work without reaching out to anyone all day. This becomes an issue for your team, because now they are no longer keeping up to date on the latest changes you have been contributing to the project. My tip would be to post periodic updates throughout the day of what you have been working on. If your company is using something like Slack or another chat server, make sure to post a detailed update on what you have been up to the past few hours. Here is an example of one of the status updates I would post to my team. Status update: - finished making changes to xyz case study and put it up for review - reviewed a couple of PRs - ran accessibility audits for the homepage and working on increasing the performance score I would usually post this in the middle of the day to update the team on what I have been working on. I also try to ask questions throughout the day to ensure that I don't get blocked on a particular issue for to long. This method of communication helps me stay connected with the team and helps my manager know where I am at in the project. Find a separate space in your home just for work When you are working in an office, there is a clear separation between work and home. This makes it easier to end your day and leave your work at the office. But with remote work, sometimes these lines between work and home become a little bit blurry. This is why it is important to designate a separate work space in your home. In my situation, I have a small desk in another room where I do all of my work. That space is only used Monday through Friday for work purposes. I have found that by creating a work space, it allows me to be in the moment and fully concentrate on my duties. Then at the end of the day, I logout out of everything and leave the work space just like I would leave a physical business. That has given me freedom to relax in my home when I am not working and fully recharge for the next day. I understand that everyone's living situation is different, and you might not have room for a designated work area. In those cases, do the best you can to carve out some space in your living situation just for work. The more you can do to separate home and business, the more productive you will be at work. Set consistent work hours When you are working in an office, you have set hours for when you are going to be there. It might be 9-5 or 8-3 with breaks throughout the day. But when you are working from home, it is very easy to work without a set schedule and put in more time outside of the standard work hours. This can quickly lead to burnout which is a huge issue within the developer community. It is really important to set a consistent work schedule so your team knows when you are available, and when you are off work. This also forces you to work within a time frame which will lead to better focus, time management and productivity. I have personally found that setting that time frame from 8-5 with breaks helps me structure my day better and get more done than if I had an open schedule. Take breaks throughout the day Developer health is another huge issue within the community. Many developers, including myself have gone for hours hunched over their computers trying to get something to work. In these situations, it is very easy to lose track of time and develop back, neck, shoulder, and eye problems. One of the key advantages of working from home is being able to take breaks and leave your work space. Take ten minute breaks throughout the day and make sure to walk around, stretch, go outside, and drink water. Taking breaks from the computer will give your body and brain a chance to rest and recharge. When I first started working remotely, I would be glued to the computer for hours at a time. But I quickly felt the negative health effects and started becoming more intentional about taking breaks. Now, I have developed a healthier work situation and can see the difference in the quality of work I am producing. Dress appropriately for important meetings We all enjoy the relaxed dress code that often accompanies working from home. In an office, you will typically be in a more work appropriate attire especially when it comes to meetings with clients. But when you are at home, it is very easy to work in some sweatpants and a t shirt. If you don't have any meetings that day, then coding in your casual attire is fine. But if you are meeting with clients or interviewing remotely, it is important to dress appropriately. Remember that it is still a business and you want to be as professional as possible, even in a remote setting. Avoid mixing personal tasks and work tasks When you are in an office, you don't worry about personal chores like doing laundry or taking the trash out. But when you are working from home, it is very easy to get distracted and mix personal tasks with work tasks. It is very important that while you are working, you are focused on work. Then during breaks, you can take care of personal items. In my situation, I make sure to finish up the task I was working on and then take a break to put a load of laundry on or take care of another personal chore. There are definitely times where something has come up and I will make sure to communicate that with the team so they know I will be unavailable for a certain amount of time. But just try to do the best that you can separating personal tasks and issues from your work tasks. Time management and structuring your day In order to work productively, it is important to plan out your day as best you can and structure your time accordingly. For example, as I am writing this blog today, I made sure to set aside time for writing the first draft, revising it and submitting it for review. During that time block, I am not focused on other PR's or other work responsibilities. That ensures I am focused 100% on writing a high quality article. Once I complete a large task, then I make sure to take a break, hydrate, walk around and eat something. That allows me to energize and gear up for the next task in my day. I found that breaking up my day into manageable tasks has provided me the opportunity to focus and produce good work. Conclusion Those are my 7 tips on what it takes to be a successful developer in a remote company. I encourage you to give each of those tips a try and see how it affects your work productivity....

May 16, 2022

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3 Web Performance Concepts that Will Help Start a Conversation Around Performance

In 2021, This Dot Labs released PerfBuddy, the free online platform for testing web and mobile based sites. With the release of this tool, it was our sincere hope to simplify the conversation around web performance, helping team leaders develop easy to understand metrics that they can use to advocate for further investment into their various web technologies. But we also realize that many new to web development, or who work in software but not as developers, might need more clarification on some of the basic key terms to help them engage more actively in conversations surrounding web development. Below, I’ve defined three of the top terms in web performance to help readers better ascertain your site’s performance, and play an active role in refining their technologies to provide the best experience for their customers. First Contentful Paint Time (FCP) FCP, or First Contentful Paint Time, is a critical metric that measures the time that users must wait in order for a page to load its first visible element. For some sites, this could be the entire page. However, for others, the FCP time might measure the seconds between a user navigating to a site, and any responsive element, such as a loading bar, appearing in front of them. This is not a measurement of backend nor even frontend script loading speed, but a metric that affords development teams the ability to infer the quality of their site’s initial UX. According to metrics published by Akamai in 2018, sites are liable to lose nearly half of their visitors if their page takes more than three seconds to load. In fact, just a single second of load time delay can result in a 7% decrease in sales conversions for eCommerce platforms. This is especially true when considering mobile users, whose likelihood of leaving a page increases 90% when made to wait 5 seconds for a page to load And as more eCommerce shoppers turn to using their mobile devices- with 53% of users accessing shopping sites via mobile platforms on 2019’s Cyber Monday, representing a 40% YOY increase- teams need to be acutely aware of their cross platform performance with respect to FCP. Time to First Byte (TTFB) Not to be confused with FCP, TTFB, or Time to First Byte, refers to the amount of time that the browser waits in order to receive initial data from its server. In order for a site to display any information, a browser must make dozens, if not more, data requests. Issues related either to the quality of the host, site functionality, or complexity can all contribute to a site’s latency, or the amount of time it takes for data to be passed between the server and the browser. Of course, reducing site latency will improve user experience by decreasing FCP, and generally increasing browsing speed. However, ensuring low TTFB will also boost your SEO by making your site more quickly crawlable by leading search engines. Page Weight As developers add features and functionality to support more advanced user experience, web pages get heavier. As of 2020, the average desktop webpage weighs 2080 KB, up from an average of 1532 KB in 2017, with the weight of mobile web pages slightly lower, but still seeing a near 40% increase in size when compared to stats from just four years ago. eCommerce websites need to maintain acute awareness of their page weight, and ensure that their latency is not overly impacted by it, due to the tendency for shopping sites to be especially complex, supporting large catalogs of products along with other features to promote customer engagement. And as this era of advanced digital transformation continues to expand, eCommerce sites must develop strategies to meet market expectations for performance without over burdening their sites with heavy plugins and functionalities. Finding Your Path to Performance It starts with equipping yourself with the right tools to test your site’s speed and weight. There are countless platforms used for testing sites, however, there are only a handful that are capable of unlocking the insight that you need to support your most critical websites. Though PerfBuddy is a great place to start in order to identify potential roadblocks, it cannot do the work of actually improving site performance. By leveraging testing platforms such as Lighthouse, and continuously improving your performance metrics with assets such as DevTools, and strategies like Google’s PRPL, eCommerce retailers can ensure that their sites meet user expectations and promote their most critical business objectives. Need help? Contact This Dot Labs to learn more about how developing the tools and strategies to ensure optimal site performance can support scalable growth as you continue refining user experience!...

Feb 9, 2022

4 mins

JavaScriptWeb PerformanceGeneral

Setting Up a Shopify App: Updating Customer Orders with Tracking Info

Today, we are wrapping up our adventure! Last time we learned about retrieving fulfillment IDs, but this time, we encounter the final boss: updating customer orders with tracking information. Now, if we have any new adventurers with us, I recommend heading over here to prep yourself for the encounter ahead. If you just need a recap of our last session, you can head over here. Alternatively, if you just want the code from last time that can be found here. If you want to skip ahead and look at the code it can be found here. With that all said we’re off to battle with updating customer orders with tracking information! Body We’re gonna start by heading over to our app/routes/app.index.jsx file, and grabbing the code found in the loader function. We’ll be moving that to our action function so we can add our post call. We’ll completely replace the existing action function code, and because of that, we need to make a couple of tweaks to the code base. We’re going to remove anything that has a reference to actionData?.product or productId. Now what we need to add the call admin.rest.resources.Fulfillment, which will allow us to update customer orders with tracking information. We’ll be placing it under our fulfillment ID loop. Here is a general example of what that call will look like. ` This is a good start as we now have our fulfillment information and get to add a few things to it. We’ll start off by adding our fulfillment ID and then our fulfillment tracking info. ` Awesome! Now we have given the fulfillment ID and tracking info we need to the fulfillment object, but we need to do one more thing for that to update. Thankfully, it’s a small thing and that’s to save it. ` Now, the above will work wonderfully for a single order, but based on our prior adventurers, we had multiple ids for orders that needed to be completed. So our next step is to loop over our fulfillment object. Though before we do that, here is what the current code should look like: ` Before we go to loop over this, we’re going to add a small change to fulfillmentIds. We’re going to create a new variable and add the company and tracking number information. So above the fulfillment variable, we will add this: ` Perfect! Now for the looping, we’ll just wrap it in a for of loop: ` Now that the loop is set up, we will be able to go through all of the orders and update them with the shipping company and a tracking number. So we’ll run a yarn dev, and navigate to the app page by pressing the p button. We should see our template page, and be able to click on the Generate a product button. Now we’ll navigate to our order page and we should see all open orders set to fulfilled. Conclusion Here we are. At the end of our three part saga, we covered a fair share of things in order to get our customer orders tracking information added, and can now take a long rest to rejuvenate....

Aug 28, 2023

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Shopify

Learning Paths for Next.JS Developers with Ankita Kulkarni

In this video, Rob Ocel and co-hosts Tracy Lee, Adam Rackis, and Danny Thompson talk with tech educator Ankita Kulkarni about her journey from engineering leader to full-time educator. Ankita shares insights on teaching Next.js, bridging practical knowledge gaps, and helping developers tackle real-world challenges. They discuss Next.js as a React-based framework, its benefits, and the challenges it presents for beginners. Chapters - Introduction to the Podcast and Guests 00:01 - Meet Ankita Kulkarni, Tech Educator 00:26 - Ankita's Transition to Full-Time Education 01:41 - Teaching Practical Knowledge in Next.js 03:19 - Effective Methods for Teaching Next.js 05:27 - Challenges of Being a Full-Time Educator 07:48 - Balancing Broad and Specific Examples 09:54 - Embracing Mistakes as a Teaching Tool 12:13 - Pair Programming and Mentorship 14:00 - Discussion on Next.js and Framework Adoption 16:48 - Advantages and Challenges of Next.js 18:12 - Choosing the Right Framework for Your Needs 20:35 - Impact of Next.js in React Documentation 22:26 - Learning Paths for New Developers 23:24 - The Rise of Full-Stack Web Development 25:09 - Benefits of Frameworks Abstracting Complexity 26:27 - OpenNext and Deployment Flexibility 28:06 - Ankita's Excitement for New Next.js Features 30:35 - The Future of Next.js Without Vercel 32:16 - Final Thoughts and Where to Find Everyone Online 34:21 Follow Ankita Kulkarni on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/kulkarniankita9 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kulkarniankita Sponsored by This Dot: thisdot.co...

Nov 12, 2024

2 mins

NextJSJavaScript

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Intro to Google DevTools: Network Panel

William Hutt

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