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Frontend developers do not know how to test for performance and do not value performance at all. It’s both equally frustrating and baffling. So much so that I h
by throwaway0asd 4y ago
Frontend developers do not know how to test for performance and do not value performance at all. It’s both equally frustrating and baffling. So much so that I have this growing voice in my head telling me to quit my job and found a performance based consultancy.
My observations contributing to the frustration:
* Developers believe performance is speed. It isn’t. Performance is a difference in measure between two (or more) competing qualities, the performance gap measured in either duration or frequency.
* Developers will double down on the prior mistake by making anecdotal observations without any forms of measurement and will vehemently argue their position in the form of a logic based value proposition. Example: X must be fast because Y and Z appear fast.
* Developers will further hold their unmeasured position by isolating their observations from how things actually work. Software is a complex system of many instructions. Except for the most trivial of toy scripts nothing executes in isolation. For example developers follow the value proposition that a grain of sand is tiny and weighs little, so therefore does not contribute to the weight or size of the beach. An example is that developers will argue to the death using querySelectors to avoid walking the DOM but in Firefox DOM walking can be as fast as 250000x faster than querySelectorAll, which is indeed significant.
I suspect there exist a variety motives for why developers reason things in this way, but from the outside it looks like a house of cards based upon argument from ignorance fallacies outputting really slow software by really defensive people.
- Someone 4y ago> Frontend developers […] do not value performance at all. I do not think that’s restricted to front-end developers. Back-end developers rarely worry about inserting yet another http request in code called from user action in a web browser, for example. A tenth of a second here, a tenth there, it all adds up. Product managers and users also don’t seem to care much or do not know how fast modern hardware is. I’ve frequently seen web page refreshes take 5 seconds or more without getting any user complaint, even when I explicitly ask them, and tell them how that could easily be halved.
- tbran 4y agoCan someone clarify this? > * Developers believe performance is speed. It isn’t. Performance is a difference in measure between two (or more) competing qualities, the performance gap measured in either duration or frequency. Maybe I'm a dummy, but if someone says "make a fast webapp", I'll be doing things like reducing requests, optimizing queries, making things smaller, using the right data structures, manipulating data in a fast and/or memory efficient way. This should result in lower loads, more stability, better availability, etc, so also "more performance". I do think of it as lots of focus on speed since, for the most part, I'm measuring how long it takes for a function/query/etc to run. Happy to check out some articles/keyword suggestions.
- throwaway0asd 4y agoThe question that matters is: How much faster is it? If you cannot answer that why should anybody believe your new website is fast?
- tbran 4y agoOkay, so we should all measure stuff.
- papruapap 4y agoWhy every thread in HN speak shit about Frontend developers? Like if BE is any better, most of them still use Java which is has bad memory and cpu performance, and unlike FE, BE have options (any native, GC-free language). Pretty sure 99% Java developers dont have any idea how the JVM works and 99,99% how to tune for better performance, they just move to the next shiny JVM implementation (omg Graalvm) and call it a day.
- Akronymus 4y agoI really do not like the java ecosystem. but: the vm can be exceedingly fast. Sadly, as you mentioned, most won't even try to make configure it right.