Nick Zuber

engineering @notionhq — previously @box @robinpowered — plt nerd, ocaml evangelist, wannabe pool pro

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

I made the checkboxes prettier and rounder with the help of the design team :)

This image is how I sold the idea to everybody

[Notion @NotionHQ]

Check—mate ♟️

[Tiger Abrodi @TAbrodi]

Many don't get why this is cool. I spent a lot of time optimizing web performance.

It was one of the main things I did at both lovable and spawn.

Here's somewhat simple and thorough explanation:

The browser rendering pipeline goes: Style → Layout → Paint → Composite.

Layout is the expensive step. It calculates where everything goes on the page. Positions. Sizes. Line breaks.

When you read offsetHeight or getBoundingClientRect, you force the browser to run layout. If you wrote to the DOM before that read, it recalculates everything. That's reflow.

A lot of layout work is text measurement. Where does this line wrap. How tall is this paragraph. How wide is this word. The browser is the only thing that can answer these questions. There's no alternative. You have to go through the DOM.

This is the root cause behind a lot of performance problems people deal with daily.

Virtual scrolling exists because you can't know element heights without rendering them first. CSS contain exists to tell the browser "don't recalculate layout outside this box." Batching DOM reads and writes exists because mixing them causes layout thrashing.

Text measurement is a big part of all of these. It's slow and locked inside the browser.

You see it in real apps too.

Slack estimates message heights for virtual scrolling. When the estimate is wrong the scroll jumps. You've seen this.

Google Docs recalculates every paragraph below your cursor when a line wraps. Every keystroke. This is why it gets slow on long documents.

AI chat apps get janky when streaming because each new token can cause a line wrap which changes the height which causes the page to jump.

Same problem every time. Need text measurements. Only way to get them is the DOM. DOM is slow.

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Over the years people have moved pieces of UI work out of the browser's layout engine. Rendering moved to Canvas and WebGL. Scrolling moved to custom implementations with transforms. Positioning moved to JavaScript-calculated coordinates. Interaction handling was always just JS.

But text was the one thing you couldn't move out. You always had to go back to the DOM to ask "how does this text wrap." Every other piece had an alternative. Text didn't.

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Enter Pretext. Pure TypeScript text measurement and line wrapping. No DOM. No reflow. You give it text, a font, and a width. It returns exact line breaks, widths, heights. Just a function call. Pure math.
Text measurement was the last piece of layout with no alternative outside the DOM. Now it does.

[Akshay Kothari @akothari]

We just held a tender that allowed current and former @NotionHQ employees to sell a portion of their vested shares at an $11B valuation.

As part of the tender, we also removed the one-year vesting cliff on options, so almost every Notion employee had the opportunity to participate.

We applied the same rules to every employee, whether you’re our most recent hire or a co-founder.

Huge thanks to Sequoia and Index for doubling down on their commitment to Notion, and we’re thrilled to welcome GIC as our newest shareholder. Given our explosive growth in APAC, we couldn’t have found a better partner.

Our industry has come a long way in how it thinks about employee secondaries. Personally, it’s incredibly gratifying to see our team able to participate in this way.

For some of our longer-tenured employees, these tenders have helped them pay off loans or buy their first home. That kind of security meaningfully changes how people think about their work and how long-term they can be in building the company.

Finally, I’m deeply grateful to the team for the craft, intensity, and consistency they bring every quarter. That work shows up in the product and in the results. The ambition ahead is even bigger. Let's keep building!

https://t.co/EahDblyMp1

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

I joined forces the editor team and wrote up a fix for this :)

Autocompleting users from that mention menu should happen much quicker now!!

[Max Spero @max_spero_]

Before anyone else tries to tell me this issue isn't real, here's a video of consistent latency issues in @NotionHQ failing to register keystrokes if I type too fast while tag menu is open.

This is unusable.

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@max_spero_ @NotionHQ Anything else with that @ mention menu?

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

I really hope somebody went as jojo sliwa this year

[Zohran Kwame Mamdani @ZohranKMamdani]

In the words of Nelson Mandela: it always seems impossible until it’s done.

My friends, it is done. And you are the ones who did it.

I am honored to be your Democratic nominee for the Mayor of New York City.

[Ivan Zhao @ivanhzhao]

At the end of each quarter, @NotionHQ designers lift cars. DM open if you are a designer who can code and lift cars.

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@tldraw Last I checked, the latest state of art for doing this was assuming trackpad when the deltas are low 😵‍💫

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

The more things change the more they stay the same…..

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@FedericoNoemie That’s my next mission

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

I made the checkboxes prettier and rounder with the help of the design team :)

This image is how I sold the idea to everybody

[Notion @NotionHQ]

Check—mate ♟️

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@zachdunn I’m glad somebody noticed

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@sebaasttiannn It was actually a bit more complex than I expected it to be, but not too bad

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@typeoneerror @NotionHQ I’m glad you like it! :)

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@bensomething Stay tuned friend 😎

The todo block checkboxes will have their day in the sun

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@ryolu_ @bensomething @NotionHQ Great news, try refreshing the page 😎

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@ryolu_ @bensomething @NotionHQ 👂🔜👀

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

@christinewa_ https://t.co/8mFwQD3yzn

[Nick Zuber @nick_zuber]

Joey Chestnut should’ve taken a sponsorship from Cool Dogs