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

Onward 2025
The morning after retirement.
Designing the Built-in AI Web APIs 2025
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.
My Participation in the METR AI Productivity Study 2025
An experience report for my participation in METR's study "Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity".

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Favorites

Mathematical Consciousness 2016
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 2013
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.
You're Missing the Point of Promises 2012
The original essay that helped promises win over callbacks in the JavaScript ecosystem.

Web Standards

Reading from Sockets 2015
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 2015
Designing JavaScript streams APIs for file I/O leads us to consider bring-your-own-buffer APIs and how to avoid race conditions.
Byte Sources: Introduction 2015
The intro to a short series of posts explaining some design decisions behind the web streams APIs, and how they abstract over underlying I/O interfaces.

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JavaScript & Node.js

ES6 Iterators, Generators, and Iterables 2013
A reference guide for JavaScript iterator and generator terminology, from back when they were just starting to see implementations in JavaScript engines.
Strict Mode = Static Scoping 2013
JavaScript strict mode has a lesser-known benefit in how it brings sanity to variable scoping.
Peer Dependencies 2013
I added the original peer dependencies feature to npm 1.2.10, to allow plugins to express what versions of a host package they're compatible with.

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Other

Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better 2025
Spaced repetition systems are a well-known way to efficiently learn material. Recent innovations have applied machine learning to greatly improve their scheduling.
Learning Japanese Part-Time 2023
After 6.5 years of studying Japanese, and only getting moderately far, I reflect on how to most effectively study a second language while only being able to spare an hour or two a day.
ChatGPT Is Not a Blurry JPEG of the Web 2023
Are LLMs just compressed representations of their training data, or something more? The "simulators" hypothesis proposes that they're much more like a human imagination.

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