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The industry is fucked because it's focusing on making core technologies better and faster instead of optimizing specific websites? I couldn't disagree more.

The industry is fucked because it's focusing on making core technologies better and faster instead of optimizing specific websites? I couldn't disagree more. In 10 years, the fixes made to existing websites will have been replaced with a new set of inefficiencies, but the benefits and drawbacks of today's physical infrastructure, protocols, and algorithms will endure.

rrix2 8y ago
> In 10 years, the fixes made to existing websites will have been replaced with a new set of inefficiencies The point I took from parent's comment is that we should consider not thinking this way, that it's not a fact set in stone. That individual sites can and should be built on better foundations that don't involve building our own transport layers
013a 8y ago
The industry is fucked because we've had 30 years of "X at any cost" mentality, which has permeated most product managers, developers, C-Suite, anyone technical. X can be a few things. Growth. Data. Analytics. Usage. Engagement. Security. But the point is the "at any cost" part, because we rarely consider the costs of the engineering decisions we make across any of these. Over 30 years, we've been able to sustain this because there's always been "more" around the corner. Facebook and Snapchat can sustain "growth at any cost" because there's always more people in some (moving target) country that the service hasn't hit yet. JS, Python, or Ruby is used to support "development speed at any cost" because we'll always have faster computers next year. Google wants "more data at any cost" because there will always be new applications of AI to find value in it, there will always be advancements in storage technology to store it, and users will never care that we're slurping up so much. But... none of this is true over a long enough timeframe. And when this idea of "the cost doesn't matter because we'll figure that out later" permeates the core of our tech stacks and people, pivoting that is ridiculously difficult. Especially when the negative changes are beginning to happen so quickly. Don't get me wrong; we need the people working on optimizing TLS, new media compression, leaner HTTP request formats, all that. But I'm saying that we need more; we need a mind-shift in the way we build software and our software companies. I don't know what that should look like, but I think what we'll discover is: Keep it simple, Abstraction layers kill performance, Making it work exactly how you want is less important than it working, working fast, and working for everyone regardless of physical, technical, or geographical disabilities, and Backward compatibility might just have to be sacrificed every once in a while.

rrix2 8y ago

> In 10 years, the fixes made to existing websites will have been replaced with a new set of inefficiencies The point I took from parent's comment is that we should consider not thinking this way, that it's not a fact set in stone. That individual sites can and should be built on better foundations that don't involve building our own transport layers

013a 8y ago

The industry is fucked because we've had 30 years of "X at any cost" mentality, which has permeated most product managers, developers, C-Suite, anyone technical. X can be a few things. Growth. Data. Analytics. Usage. Engagement. Security. But the point is the "at any cost" part, because we rarely consider the costs of the engineering decisions we make across any of these. Over 30 years, we've been able to sustain this because there's always been "more" around the corner. Facebook and Snapchat can sustain "growth at any cost" because there's always more people in some (moving target) country that the service hasn't hit yet. JS, Python, or Ruby is used to support "development speed at any cost" because we'll always have faster computers next year. Google wants "more data at any cost" because there will always be new applications of AI to find value in it, there will always be advancements in storage technology to store it, and users will never care that we're slurping up so much. But... none of this is true over a long enough timeframe. And when this idea of "the cost doesn't matter because we'll figure that out later" permeates the core of our tech stacks and people, pivoting that is ridiculously difficult. Especially when the negative changes are beginning to happen so quickly. Don't get me wrong; we need the people working on optimizing TLS, new media compression, leaner HTTP request formats, all that. But I'm saying that we need more; we need a mind-shift in the way we build software and our software companies. I don't know what that should look like, but I think what we'll discover is: Keep it simple, Abstraction layers kill performance, Making it work exactly how you want is less important than it working, working fast, and working for everyone regardless of physical, technical, or geographical disabilities, and Backward compatibility might just have to be sacrificed every once in a while.