3 ms·

I think it might be necessary to just frame speed as a problem everyone can relate to, Ferengi as well as developers. One possibility for speed as in latency w

by corty 6y ago

I think it might be necessary to just frame speed as a problem everyone can relate to, Ferengi as well as developers. One possibility for speed as in latency would be to pre-agree on a latency budget (as in realtime-systems: if you exceed that deadline, your system has failed). Then have everyone be aware of how they spend that latency budget. Say the latency deadline is at 500ms for your website to full interactivity. Currently you are at 320ms. Marketing wants to include some analytics scripts. Include them in the test page, measure the added latency, then check against your deadline: added 200ms, we are now at 520ms. Do we reject marketing's wishes or do we make the design dept. cut back on their image load times, maybe they can get from 130ms to 90ms? How about investing in better caching to get 100ms? That way you can discuss numbers and can quantify how something impacts the overall experience. Budgets is something everyone can understand, and taking a big gulp out of a limited budget is something no-one wants to be seen doing.

eska 6y ago
A technique I learned from Tanenbaum's operating systems book back in the day, that has served me well over the years, is to come up with the theoretical maximum and compare it to a naive implementation. For example right now I have to deal with a data interface provided by a partner company. The theoretical limit of the interface should be 1.625 MB/s. If we were to stupidly copy our numeric streaming data over, we would be within our timing budget, and optimizing this would be optional. However, the implementation of the partner company only reaches 0.1MB/s max. So their "smart" implementation/interface is only 6% efficient, or in other words could be 16 times better. That really helps putting things into perspective, and turns management's bullshit filter on, when the partner company says "you can buy this from us if you want more performance" or "that's just the limit of the hardware".

by corty 6y ago

eska 6y ago

A technique I learned from Tanenbaum's operating systems book back in the day, that has served me well over the years, is to come up with the theoretical maximum and compare it to a naive implementation. For example right now I have to deal with a data interface provided by a partner company. The theoretical limit of the interface should be 1.625 MB/s. If we were to stupidly copy our numeric streaming data over, we would be within our timing budget, and optimizing this would be optional. However, the implementation of the partner company only reaches 0.1MB/s max. So their "smart" implementation/interface is only 6% efficient, or in other words could be 16 times better. That really helps putting things into perspective, and turns management's bullshit filter on, when the partner company says "you can buy this from us if you want more performance" or "that's just the limit of the hardware".