Handmade: A Community for Self-Rolled Performant Software (2016)

It makes complete sense for the manifesto to be timestamped, but the surprise was that I didn't realise I was reading the manifesto rather than this actually being the normal landing page... there's no title or anything and HN usually links to homepages.

But a quick glance at the forum and the homepage shows there's activity there still!

Clicking around, this seems really interesting :)

For most software, you should probably focus on architecture instead of the lower level of your code. Sane code and architecture solves most performance issues. This includes technology decisions, like using web tech for applications instead of the native platform.

For example, Apple has had a lead of at least five years over Android when it comes to performance and user experience, because their system and apps were all built in native environments, instead of the JVM abstraction layer. It took at least five years for Android to catch up, and it took quadcore CPU's to do it. Around then, Apple carefully started using dual-core CPUs.

Meanwhile, companies like Facebook and Twitter spent dozens of work-years on trying to make web technology feasible in native apps and never really cracked it.

If they had just focused on building good native apps they wouldn't have wasted so much time.

Caveat / Aside: IIRC Facebook is having / has had massive issues with having too much code / classes / files in their app(s), on both iOS and Android. Which is (I believe) one of the reasons why they split off Messenger into its own app at the time.

Which is great ! I just don't know how to transfer that to building software as a team with multiple skillsets, unknown feature set (because market feet is still searched for) aggressive schedule, (We don't know what we want to build , but we need it in six months), large target audience ("what do you mean they have to install stuff ? Where is the link I can paste in an email so they open it in IE6 ?") , and,let's be honest, less knowledgable and more lazy developers.

(To be clear : I'm not criticizing the network or project. I just find it interesting that they had a goal - making fast software - and that, to the ebest of my knowledge and without a rigorous analysis - it seems that most projects converged on a very particular kind of software. Which just happens not to be the kind most of us will ever be working on, but it does not matter. Go them !)