Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?

#151

Post by TammyEverts » Mon, Mar 04, 2024, 7:43 PM UTC

I've been working in the performance industry (focusing on front-end performance and UX) for 15 years. Some resources you might find helpful:

• Steve Souders' books 'High Performance Web Sites' & 'Even Faster Web Sites' – https://stevesouders.com/ – Steve literally wrote the book(s) on performance and is widely considered the godfather of the industry.

• WPO stats – https://wpostats.com/ – Case studies and experiments demonstrating the impact of performance optimization on UX and business metrics

• performance.now() talks – https://www.youtube.com/c/WebConferencesAmsterdam/videos – PerfNow is the only annual global conference dedicated to performance. You can watch past talks on their YouTube channel.

• Intro to Web Performance – https://support.speedcurve.com/docs/psychology-of-web-perfor... – This is a collection of introductory articles covering topics like the psychology of sit speed to Core Web Vitals to how to create a performance culture in your organization.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?

#152

Post by tonyarkles » Sun, Mar 10, 2024, 10:44 PM UTC

michaelmior wrote: post #148

tonyarkles wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But knowing what needs to be optimized doesn't necessarily mean you know how to optimize it. True, although not knowing what needs to be optimized guarantees that you don't know how to optimize it :). > knowing more about how to actually write optimized code can help you make more informed decisions earlier on in the development process. Totally agree though, despite poking a bit of fun. This is something that I've…

> The one very important thing to keep in mind though is that you're going to need to peel back the abstractions and understand what's happening under the hood. I agree with this although I think it can sometimes be a red herring for those new to optimization. It's possible to spend a lot of time digging deeper when that's not really what's needed. For example, you might find a particular database query that's really…

Apologies for the super late reply, I was travelling.

I totally agree, and that’s where experience comes into play and building a more holistic understanding of how the systems you’re using actually work. If I had a slow query in, say, Postgres, the very first thing I would be doing is “explain analyze” to see what the query plan is and what steps the database will be doing to execute it. 98% of the time doing that will either give you insight into how you might restructure your query or which indices you need to add to make it faster.

Re: Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?

#153

Post by mohn » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 8:37 PM UTC

newprint wrote: post #2

There is a MIT course on YouTube and also, there is a pretty famous former M$ performance engineer who worked on Xbox and bunch of other large projects, he has webpage about how he tracks down bugs and performance issues, don't it have it handy unfortunately. Another thing to look at - low level optimization. There is a cool book, two volumes written by a German guy - I don't have a link for it either. Maybe someone…

> there is a pretty famous former M$ performance engineer who worked on Xbox and bunch of other large projects, he has webpage about how he tracks down bugs and performance issues, don't it have it handy unfortunately.

Bruce Dawson's blog, Random ASCII?

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/