3 ms·

So this has gotten to the point for me where it is a big enough burning painpoint where I would pay for a service which provided passably fast versions of the w

by pea 6y ago

So this has gotten to the point for me where it is a big enough burning painpoint where I would pay for a service which provided passably fast versions of the web-based tools which I frequently have to use. In my day-to-day as a startup founder I use these tools where the latency of every operation makes them considerably less productive for me (this is on a 2016 i5 16GB MBP): - Hubspot - Gmail (with Apollo, Boomerang Calendar, and HubSpot extensions) - Intercom (probably the worst culprit) - Notion (love the app - but it really seems 10x slower than a desktop text editor should be imo) - Apollo - LinkedIn - GA - Slack The following tools I use (or have used) seem fast to me to the point where I'd choose them over others: - Basecamp - GitHub (especially vs. BitBucket) - Amplitude - my CLI - not being facetious, but using something like https://github.com/go-jira/jira https://github.com/go-jira/jira over actual jira makes checking or creating an issue so quick that you don't need to context switch from whatever else you were doing I know it sounds spoiled, but when you're spending 10+ hours a day in these tools, latency for every action _really_ adds up - and it also wears you down. You dread having to sign in to something you know is sluggish. Realistically I cannot use any of these tools with JS disabled, best option is basically to use a fresh Firefox (which you can't for a lot of Gmail extensions) with uBlock. I tried using Station/Stack but they seemed just as sluggish as using your browser. It's probably got a bunch of impossible technical hurdles, but I really want someone to build a tool which turns all of these into something like old.reddit.com or hacker news style experience, where things happen under 100ms. Maybe a stepping stone is a way to boot electron in Gecko/Firefox (not sure what happened to positron). The nice things about tools like Basecamp is that because loading a new page is so fucking fast, you can just move around different pages like you'd move around the different parts of one page on an SPA. Browsing to a new page seems to have this fixed cost in people's minds, but realistically it's often quicker than waiting for a super interactive component to pull in a bunch of data and render it. Their website is super fast, and I think their app is just a wrapper around the website, but is still super snappy. It's exactly the experience I wish every tool I used had. IMO there are different types of latency - I use some tools which aren't "fast" for everything, but seem extremely quick and productive to use for some reason. For instance, IntelliJ/PyCharm/WebStorm is slow to boot - fine. But once you're in it, it's pretty quick to move around. Can somebody please build something to solve this problem!

midrus 6y ago
Ohh God, can't upvote this enough. I feel the same. I work as a frontend dev and I just can't believe the amount of stuff we do in the user's browsers just because it's convenient for us, developers or because asking backend devs to do it will take longer or because it's the way to do it in React. SPAs can be faster of course, but most of the times they are not, and they are a lot worse than their equivalent rails or django app because your company just doesn't have the resources Facebook has. And even Facebook is terribly slow, so not sure what the benefits are at the end of the day. Talking of reddit, I just cannot use it. I rely on old.reddit.com for now and the day it goes away I will only use it from a native client on my phone, or just not use it anymore. I feel like repeating myself in every single comment I do on this topic but I really believe that tools such as Turbolinks, Stimulus or my favourite: unpoly are highly underrated. If we put 20% the effort we put on SPAs on building clean, well organized and tested traditional web applications we would be in a much better place, and faster (in the sense of shipping and of performance). We should focus more on the end user and the business and a bit less on what's cool for the developers.
- pea 6y ago
  Yep, there are some websites which _should_ be SPAs because they are actual applications - for instance, I can't imagine Google Docs or Trello as an MPA. But, many websites are a graph of documents (like Reddit), so trying to model them as an SPA just massively increases complexity and introduces some really tricky problems. We moved from an SPA -> MPA and haven't looked back (with Intercooler/Stimulus/alpine). One of the main parts is that, because you don't need to manage and reconcile state in two places, you have much less complexity. When we need a single component that needs to be very interactive (for instance, we have an interactive table viewer which allows sorting and searching), we embed a little bit of React or whatever -- but that's kind of a last resort, and it's as stateless as possible. I think handling state sensibly in a pure SPA architecture is actually much more complex than people give it credit for. A Redux + React + REST architecture can be done properly - but it also introduces a huge number of potential rabbit holes which have a high ongoing maintenance cost, especially if you do not have a team of very experienced FE engineers. New Reddit is a great testament to just how badly it go can when you fight against "the web as a collection of documents" and what browsers originally did. For instance clicking on the background of a Reddit post to then navigate you "back" in the SPA, instead of using your browser back button - it's actually insane. None of this is to say that templates can't be a bit painful themselves at times too - not sure what happened to https://inertiajs.com/ https://inertiajs.com/, but I quite like the idea of that approach too.

by pea 6y ago

midrus 6y ago

Ohh God, can't upvote this enough. I feel the same. I work as a frontend dev and I just can't believe the amount of stuff we do in the user's browsers just because it's convenient for us, developers or because asking backend devs to do it will take longer or because it's the way to do it in React. SPAs can be faster of course, but most of the times they are not, and they are a lot worse than their equivalent rails or django app because your company just doesn't have the resources Facebook has. And even Facebook is terribly slow, so not sure what the benefits are at the end of the day. Talking of reddit, I just cannot use it. I rely on old.reddit.com for now and the day it goes away I will only use it from a native client on my phone, or just not use it anymore. I feel like repeating myself in every single comment I do on this topic but I really believe that tools such as Turbolinks, Stimulus or my favourite: unpoly are highly underrated. If we put 20% the effort we put on SPAs on building clean, well organized and tested traditional web applications we would be in a much better place, and faster (in the sense of shipping and of performance). We should focus more on the end user and the business and a bit less on what's cool for the developers.

pea 6y ago
Yep, there are some websites which _should_ be SPAs because they are actual applications - for instance, I can't imagine Google Docs or Trello as an MPA. But, many websites are a graph of documents (like Reddit), so trying to model them as an SPA just massively increases complexity and introduces some really tricky problems. We moved from an SPA -> MPA and haven't looked back (with Intercooler/Stimulus/alpine). One of the main parts is that, because you don't need to manage and reconcile state in two places, you have much less complexity. When we need a single component that needs to be very interactive (for instance, we have an interactive table viewer which allows sorting and searching), we embed a little bit of React or whatever -- but that's kind of a last resort, and it's as stateless as possible. I think handling state sensibly in a pure SPA architecture is actually much more complex than people give it credit for. A Redux + React + REST architecture can be done properly - but it also introduces a huge number of potential rabbit holes which have a high ongoing maintenance cost, especially if you do not have a team of very experienced FE engineers. New Reddit is a great testament to just how badly it go can when you fight against "the web as a collection of documents" and what browsers originally did. For instance clicking on the background of a Reddit post to then navigate you "back" in the SPA, instead of using your browser back button - it's actually insane. None of this is to say that templates can't be a bit painful themselves at times too - not sure what happened to https://inertiajs.com/ https://inertiajs.com/, but I quite like the idea of that approach too.