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In DayJob we produce web based applications, as do friends in other companies. One common refrain when commenting on the heavy payload for the applications is t

In DayJob we produce web based applications, as do friends in other companies. One common refrain when commenting on the heavy payload for the applications is that they are not targetting mobile phones (good job, the apps are not terrible useable on a small display) and the clients won't care (which is actually true, for the most part at least). Some don't seem to realise that tethering to the mobile network is a thing when something is amiss with the local network's connection to the outside world (more common now than it used to be, with more people working remotely) or trying to get stuff done while travelling - so users might have a decent sized screen & chunky processor but still be talking to us over a low-bandwidth & high-latencey link. A lot of devs should spend more time with Chrom{ium|e}'s network throttling options turned on. It is far from perfect, but gives at least some insight into the troubles experienced by those with less than ideal connectivity. Perhaps I'll see if, next time I have my infrastructure hat on, there is a way to enforce that as a policy that can't be overridden!

solardev 4y ago
I hear that "we're not really targeting mobile" excuse less and less often these days (phones are, what, half of users?). But I do hear another excuse frequently: performance isn't free, as in spending time on performance optimization means something else has to give: more features, quicker delivery, better testing, readability and documentation, package reinvention, whatever. People cobble together npm packages because it saves time vs having to reinvent their whole color conversion solution, or page routing system, or unit converter or whatever. And sometimes management is the one unwilling to budge. I couldn't get us to spend ANY time on performance until I showed them a video like, "Hey, I know this works fine on our latest Macs, but check out what happens when I try to run this on a 2-year-old budget Windows laptop, like our users would have. It barely even runs." Only then did we start testing with not just network throttling but CPU throttling too. There are still some really slow computers out there.

solardev 4y ago

I hear that "we're not really targeting mobile" excuse less and less often these days (phones are, what, half of users?). But I do hear another excuse frequently: performance isn't free, as in spending time on performance optimization means something else has to give: more features, quicker delivery, better testing, readability and documentation, package reinvention, whatever. People cobble together npm packages because it saves time vs having to reinvent their whole color conversion solution, or page routing system, or unit converter or whatever. And sometimes management is the one unwilling to budge. I couldn't get us to spend ANY time on performance until I showed them a video like, "Hey, I know this works fine on our latest Macs, but check out what happens when I try to run this on a 2-year-old budget Windows laptop, like our users would have. It barely even runs." Only then did we start testing with not just network throttling but CPU throttling too. There are still some really slow computers out there.