Why Performance Actually Matters (The Standup)

No way they actually put the stand up in the title this time. Never thought I'd see the day

My company was building something to be used in schools. I got a spec sheet from the contractors building it, and they were like "It will run on the latest macos release." I had to go back and be like, "so I actually need this to be running on the worst chromebook, with 0.5MB internet speed". It literally just hadn't occurred to them that it needed to run on a normal child's computer, even though the audience was 8 year olds. People are more concerned with doing something that looks super impressive than something that works really well.

Casey talking about this was such a breath of fresh air. Those are thoughts I've carried with me and talked to other people about for at least the last 16 years, and my own philosophy for developing a lot of software (especially game dev, but also at my current job) is to use an under-powered preferably slightly outdated device to develop, debug, and test on. Not to combat e-waste (although that is a nice side-effect too), but mostly because I'll be getting a similar experience to the people ending up using the software. If I'm just testing on a beefy monster 30k USD workstation gaming beast of a PC, then of course it's gonna run "well enough". Most people won't have that experience. And so I don't want that disconnect at all. If I can run on worse hardware than most people have, I'd rather do that, and ensure that the experience is actually good for me. Because then it'll probably be even better for everyone else.

Thanks for putting the standup in the title this time!

Casey sounds like old man yelling at cloud and I love him for it.

A large reason why web apps are so slow is because they are developed in zero latency local development environments where the server and database are 0ms away. So any roundtrips or request waterfalls are completely invisible to the developer. Plus the bloated JavaScript front-end is running on a 10 core MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon. It’s like frictionless surfaces in physics: it doesn’t match real world conditions at all. Production is just where Sentry exceptions come from and those mythical users hang out. It works and is fast on my computer, and the staging server is on a cheap cloud instance so I’m going to ignore any latency and lag issues seen there.

I explained to some genz devs who ordered 4 containers for a little simple service and me saying, nope! You can get two! Make it work! They were bitching and moaning about the load. I explained to them that in 1999 I worked at the second largest Internet site in our country and we serviced 9000 hits per minute on an SGI O200 (200 MHz with 64MB) we are not even getting that kind of load on an internal service. And if you do you’ll definitely want to make a library that you link into the calling system. You can expose a rest interface for the odd call of another system. A lot of whining and bitching. So they go to the manager, he comes to me and I explain what that service was doing and why I refused the cost of 4 containers (that adds up). Then he went back and said to them to make it work 😂

One thing that always blows my mind with how slow it is: network modems and routers. Like just trying to reset those boxes and get your internet working could be a 10-minute wait.

I've never thought of bad software as a driver for increased e-waste.

Casey's rants never disappoint