Domenic Denicola

Domenic Denicola

I'm a recently-retired software engineer who focused on web browser development and web standards. I'm only starting to figure out what's next.

You may know me from my work on JavaScript promises and modules, streams and other WHATWG standards, custom elements, or the navigation API. Most recently I worked on speculative loading for web performance, and built-in AI APIs to expose the browser or OS's AI models to web developers.

I'm passing the time before the singularity hits by exploring Tokyo, where I moved in 2022. I spend a lot of time trying to learn Japanese, as well as keeping up with the latest in AI capabilities and safety research. I also maintain the jsdom open-source project. In a past life, I did physics research.

Latest

  1. On the Streams Standard

    A response to James Snell's "We deserve a better streams API for JavaScript", and a reflection on what it means to develop and implement web standards.

  2. The Wrong Work, Done Beautifully

    A snow town bakery, a six-year-old bug, and the unsettling ease of agentic open source maintenance.

  3. Onward

    The morning after retirement.

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Favorites

  • Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better

    Spaced repetition systems are a well-known way to efficiently learn material. Recent innovations have applied machine learning to greatly improve their scheduling.

  • Mathematical Consciousness

    What if your mind is nothing more than evolving data—and what if the cosmos is nothing more than a static mathematical object?

  • Explaining Away the Web's Magic

    An introduction to the extensible web manifesto, a web API design philosophy that espouses exposing primitives and letting developers build high-level abstractions that are competitive with those shipped with the browser.

Web Standards

  • Designing the Built-in AI Web APIs

    Creating web standards for AI models means wrestling with questions that didn't exist two years ago. Here's what I've learned building the prompt API and its siblings.

  • Reading from Sockets

    Designing JavaScript streams APIs for network sockets, on top of non-blocking syscalls, leads us to the concept of push vs. pull sources.

  • Reading from Files

    Designing JavaScript streams APIs for file I/O leads us to consider bring-your-own-buffer APIs and how to avoid race conditions.

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JavaScript & Node.js

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Other

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