I believe I first learned to shorten animations on MacOSXHints.com (gone now). Regardless, I learned a lot of great "enhancements" here:

https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles

And here's the blog of the person who ran MacOSXHints.com:

https://robservatory.com/make-your-macos-dock-suck/

Fun aside, I'm pretty sure that my mention of a system issue that I read about that morning on MacOSXHints.com was a helper in landing a job in an interview that afternoon. What I mean is, I said, oh are you talking about "whatever thing on that site today…?" and it demonstrated that I was familiar with whatever internals.