June 2026

Ahhh, it's a good night to do some coding. I improved the performance of the market page in my D&D application, reducing overall page load time from 2 seconds to 0.8 seconds.

Players purchase items using a "Buy" form. The DM has additional controls in that form to "Give" a player character tradegoods directly. One of those <form> elements exists for each player-purchasable tradegood, and there are about 1,200 of those now. While profiling, I discovered that the 100ish <option> tags on each "Buy/Give" form (one for each potential buyer or recipient of the purchase) were bloating the page to a horrific 25 MB.

This book was valuable even though I'd already read Under the Black Flag and The Republic of Pirates. Dolin focuses on piracy's effects on the eastern seaboard of colonial-era America, which the other books only covered in passing as necessary.

For instance, from The Republic of Pirates I knew the basic outline of Henry Avery's attack on Muslim treasure fleets off the coast of India, but I never knew that the Mughal Empire's outcry over that attack, transmitted to the British East India Company and from there to the Crown, directly led to an Act of Parliament which materially contributed to the decline of piracy in its Golden Age. I also didn't know that there was a thriving pirate base in Madagascar involved in both the slave trade and the transport of pirates to and from the New World.