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
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
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.
seestheday@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
I might know the answer to your last point. I have experience working with financial services and large old institutions.
In short the front end is likely lighting fast and lightweight but the services it relies are incredibly old and outdated. Like mainframes running COBOL old. There is likely some abstraction but there are also likely literal decades of technical debt. Sometimes a call to understand what should be simple like what accounts does this client have might need to call multiple legacy systems that were integrated over the course of multiple acquisitions.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 54 minutes ago
That sounds like a cop-out to me. Surely they could have snapshots of data in a more reasonable system to make common operations fast (mostly querying data), while keeping the old systems as the source of truth, no? We do that, and we have far fewer customers than a major bank does…