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Making our new homepage fast and performant

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Re: Making our new homepage fast and performant

#41

Post by wizzwizz4 »

scrollaway wrote: post #36
rgovostes wrote: post #29

This JPGs-in-a-SVG thing is grotesque, an example of how web development often seems like a Jenga tower of hacks. Why not find minimally-perceptible pixel changes to the image that allow it to compress better as PNG?

> Why not find minimally-perceptible pixel changes to the image that allow it to compress better as PNG? I would bet a whole pizza, anchovies included, that you'd be the first one to fire an engineer who wasted his time pixel-perfecting a random PNG on your homepage under the guise of performance, when this is actually an alternative. The JPG-in-SVG is a beautiful hack to work around Apple's former refusal to support…

Just write a program to do the pixel-perfecting.

Re: Making our new homepage fast and performant

#42

Post by 01acheru »

Talking about nice looking homepages that load fast the first one that came to mind is Stripe's.

It starts with 952.83 KB / 364 KB transferred and goes to 1.70 MB / 482.03 KB transferred on final load (once you reach the bottom of the page) Github's starts with 3.10 MB / 969.27 KB transferred and goes to 6.64 MB / 4.54 MB transferred

Yeah, Github's homepage has more content, it's true... but what I find really amazing about Stripe's homepage is that those kind of previews of their interface are not images, they are built with actual code!

Stripe has a really awesome dev culture, problem solving to the next level, also on their homepage!

edit: typo

Re: Making our new homepage fast and performant

#46

Post by scrollaway »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #41
scrollaway wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not find minimally-perceptible pixel changes to the image that allow it to compress better as PNG? I would bet a whole pizza, anchovies included, that you'd be the first one to fire an engineer who wasted his time pixel-perfecting a random PNG on your homepage under the guise of performance, when this is actually an alternative. The JPG-in-SVG is a beautiful hack to work around Apple's former refusal to support…

Just write a program to do the pixel-perfecting.

Now that's a thought. (OptiPNG exists, btw: http://optipng.sourceforge.net/)

The fact is, if you know how JPG and PNG work, you'll know that a colorful and busy image like the one linked in the article, with lots of varying alpha colors and values for anti-aliasing, is basically impossible to compress anywhere close to a JPG.

There are more lossy ways to compress PNG which aren't done automatically anywhere to my knowledge, such as reducing the amount of colors to fit a smaller color space.

What you can also do is turn the image into contiguous chunks so that they are in a pattern that is more compressib… wait, we're just reinventing JPG aren't we.

Re: Making our new homepage fast and performant

#47

Post by remolacha »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #37

The never ending tug of war: Developers decrease load speed from 3 seconds to 1 second. Company decides they now have 2 extra seconds of load time to include more analytics, larger splash videos, animations, etc. Before long, the site is back to loading in 3 seconds and a richer (more bloated) web experience is born. History moves in a spiral.

And hopefully, some of those extra analytics, animations, and experiences add value. One great thing about high performance on the fundamentals is that it let’s us move to a higher level of abstraction.

Re: Making our new homepage fast and performant

#48

Post by sltkr »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #40
0-_-0 wrote: post #18

What does the word performant mean exactly?

I think it means fast, but it's used when someone wants a buzzword. I wish people would use fast instead. I feel the same way with learnings (use lessons ).

The title is “Making GitHub’s new homepage fast and performant” which suggests performant is something different from (just) fast.

Re: Making our new homepage fast and performant

#50

Post by kreeben »

kreetx wrote: post #38
kreeben wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Who Newbies! You used to be a newbie to. Remember?

I think you'll still be clicking on links taking you to repository pages. I think I've gone to the homepage only whenever people complain about the design (last I heard it had gone enterprisey).

Non-pointy-haired-boss: Newbies, go get yourselves a github account, so that you can start contributing. Noobs: [scrambling to find the right repo]

Almost never happens.

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