Memory is not cheap
The thing is, these mantras are always taken out of context.
“Memory is cheap” is in comparison to other options. For example, if you have a the choice between optimizing for CPU or memory, you should optimize for CPU almost every time because it’s a lot cheaper to add more RAM than add more CPU.
But for some reason, we’ve taken this to mean, “I don’t need to optimize memory or CPU because I can just upgrade them.” That’s only true until it isn’t, and it’s generally easier to optimize things as you go than optimize once everything is broken.
Good post. I really don’t understand how apps have gotten so terrible.
The app I work on is slow, but that’s because we’re doing pretty heavy things (3D canvas stuff), but even then we do a really bad job of lazy loading stuff (e.g. images used for that 3D stuff are loaded way before you get to the 3D part, and many users don’t use the 3D feature at all in a session).
But at least we have an excuse. Why does the bank app take forever to load when it just needs to query around balances and submit tasks to their backend to process? That should be incredibly lightweight.
turkalino@lemmy.yachts 4 weeks ago
Author did kinda reference this with the ✨Development Velocity✨ part, but the truth is managers and businesspeople* are the ones that just don’t care. Well, not about users at least. Managers just care about promotions and maintaining the upper hand in office politics, and businesspeople just care about money.
If devs were given the proper amount of time to implement things, they wouldn’t be adding GBs of NPM packages from which only one function is used.
If devs were given any power in the decision-making process, the “17 tracking scripts you put on your websites which added 0.004 pence to your bottom line” would never be added
LiamMayfair@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
Agreed.
A lot of the time the cause of bad UX or poor quality code is not the Devs, but management, one way or another. Either through pressure to build more to increasingly delirious timelines or by not looking after their company culture.
You tend to see nonsensical, disjointed product UX and usability decisions a lot more in bigger, highly hierarchical organisations, with big teams, highly specialised, siloed ICs several levels removed from their end users by layers and layers of middle management fat.
I imagine if HSBC put out apps like OP’s article claims is because they probably follow a command and control structure like above, where developers are just tiny cogs hyper-focused on low-level tasks in a bigger, complex corporate machine and nobody really understands the full picture.
turkalino@lemmy.yachts 4 weeks ago
Yep, and those layers and layers of middle management will never walk away from a UI/UX review saying “yeah, looks good to me!” because that wouldn’t justify their existence, so they feel compelled to say something even when there’s zero real issues, which is how you end up with inane bullshit