😮💨
AI assistant tools probably won’t push us on the right direction for this one. (Or maybe they will by encouraging people not to import a different library for any 6-lines function they need?)
if you make your payment processing website unusable on 3 year old mid-range Android because adding 10 MB more Javascript increases ✨Development Velocity✨, there’s a special place in hell for you.
Look, I hate bloated websites too (in fact I hate most websites in general, give me a native desktop app that doesn’t use Electron or Webview!), but if a 3 year old midrange Android gives you trouble loading things, maybe blame the manufacturer. I flashed a custom rom on a 2019 Oneplus 7 Pro and it’s super fast now compared to the last version of the official ROM that it got. It’s my secondary device. Primary is an iPhone that’s 2 years old and showing any signs of slowing down.
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
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.
Also the only time I’ve heard “memory is cheap” used IRL was in backend development. Because it’s cheap to scale up memory on your servers, but not cheap to spend a day or 2 hyperoptimizing a solution that’s fast enough. Dev time is expensive.
Or for workstations. It’s a lot cheaper to add a stick of RAM to a workstation than optimize workflow a bit.
There are many cases where RAM is not cheap:
- mobile apps
- end user machines - most people won’t add that stick of RAM
- macOS apps - pretty much all Apple products use soldered RAM now
If you control the machine, RAM is cheap, until it isn’t. If you don’t control the machine, you should always keep an eye on RAM, because once the complaints start coming in, you’ve already started losing customers.
MacOS has weirdly fast paging and shit, you don’t feel the lack of RAM immediately. But in the long run it’ll kill your (also soldered) SSD so that’s even worse for heavy users.
I think phone apps have more to play with as well nowadays. A Galaxy A55 can have 12 gigs of RAM now. That used to be considered overkill for even flagships, let alone midrange phones, just a few years ago. Plus both operating systems will suspend apps running in the background when needed.
My phone is pretty recent and has 8GB RAM, and it’s still fairly common to find phones with 4GB RAM. You really can’t rely on a consistent amount of RAM, so being careful with memory is still important.
I can sympathize. And what they don’t know is that JavaScript heavy apps actually decrease development satisfaction and speed, while also making the end result crappier.
