Test your product on a crappy laptop • Hacker News Board

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#141

Post by pacifika » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 9:56 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #96

kingcharles wrote: post #57

Please. I beg you to buy a 2GB of transfer cell plan from a cheap carrier and try your sites via tethering. If you can only load your SPA a couple of times before your line gets disconnected, you've fucked up your design. I had plans with 35GB of transfer and the modern web meant I was having to restart my plan every single week. Some of us live in Internet deserts where there is no hope of getting a wired connection…

I don't think I've ever seen a site that would use up 2GB of data being loaded "a couple of times". What sort of site would do that?

Netflix ;-)

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#142

Post by faeyanpiraat » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #51

ehsankia wrote: post #39

Even more than crappy laptop, please please test your application on bad/degraded networks. So many apps completely glitch and breakdown in bad network environments.

I've used toxiproxy [1] to imitate various network problems (slowness, lost packets, dropping connections, etc). It works pretty well, and is even amenable to running during functional / integration tests. [1]: https://github.com/shopify/toxiproxy

This looks amazing

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#143

Post by l0b0 » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 10:04 AM UTC

taeric wrote: post #73

l0b0 wrote: post #41

There are three kinds of web developers: - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen. - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites w…

Explain Gmail.

I don't understand this comment. Google clearly cares about the performance of that product, since it's the fastest webmail I've used by a long shot. Or maybe you care more about performance than almost everyone, and use Mutt or something else which can be configured to be faster with a few days' worth of effort.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#144

Post by littlehugie » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

meheleventyone wrote: post #122

nirui wrote: post #91

However, there maybe another darkside of the story. Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the game that they released demands such high hardware requirements. The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the ga…

Then Roblox and Minecraft came along and showed everyone there was a large audience of kids on crap PCs and Chomebooks who will also play games and have parents who will spend for them.

This. My kids Play minecraft on the Amazon Kids tablets. They startet with a older Version with only 1.5GB of RAM and the game kind of worked good enough for them to enjoy it. It worked for many years and only had Problems with large Outdoor areas. Now they use the newer 3GB kids Version and it works really well. I am very happy to not needing to buy them 400€ tablets for this game.

(Btw, i developed medical dicom viewer for large CT and MRI data, on a 10yrs old dell Laptop. The viewer was always fast on customer machines. If it would not work on my machine, i tunded the Software until it does ;) )

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#145

Post by mehdix » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

bullen wrote: post #140

I go one step further, all software I make is developed on Raspberry 2 (2W, JavaSE server) and 4 (7W, C/OpenGL client). That way I don't have to worry about missing any performance beat! Since energy prices are guaranteed to increase forever, I'm surprised this is not default behaviour.

I do it sometimes on a Pinebook Pro. It's like raspberry pi but with a solid aluminium body, a good keyboard and a good enough screen.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#146

Post by chrismorgan » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #22

MattGaiser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a dev, I make none of those decisions.

Also as a dev, I don’t really care. It’s not my money on the line, it’s the companies. If the site sucks and users don’t like it, the company loses profits and they will be forced to change. The only thing I take a stand on is when the product is actively harmful and immoral. Just being shit or slow is not my problem.

Trouble is that your users are generally in a similar situation, not getting to choose what tools they use. By producing bad software, you’re making their life harder personally.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#147

Post by kristopolous » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 10:12 AM UTC

Try it on a low end smartphone under $50 as well. (Some are under $30)

Most things are painful on one of those. Be the exception

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#148

Post by Brave-Steak » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 10:15 AM UTC

nirui wrote: post #91

However, there maybe another darkside of the story. Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the game that they released demands such high hardware requirements. The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the ga…

Notably, this is one reason why WoW managed to hit such a wide audience and become so successful. The art design made the game look amazing, but the hardware requirements were so low you could run it on a potato. Its contemporary, Everquest 2, managed to look uglier while being much harder to run.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#149

Post by habosa » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

Even if your users all use high end laptops, this is still a good idea. Making your site fast enough on a craptop will make it blazing fast and delightful for everyone else. It’s like how baseball players warm up with weighted bats.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#150

Post by usr1106 » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 10:24 AM UTC

LeonM wrote: post #136

ehsankia wrote: post #39

Even more than crappy laptop, please please test your application on bad/degraded networks. So many apps completely glitch and breakdown in bad network environments.

This. 2 rules: - Always indicate that your application is performing a network action (like showing a spinner, disable forms/buttons while submitting, etc) - Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong. Try letting your local development backend return a 500, timeout or a 4xx error every now and then, and check if your frontend handles this in a gracef…

> Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong.

The worst offender I hit regularly is Google Meet. I use ADSL most of the day because it works just fine for most I do. Which is either local or ssh or looking up technical resources on the net. Even Google Meet works fine (I don't use a cam). Until I share my screen, which contains nothing but text in full screen. Then Google Meet will forever freeze the shared picture after a couple of minutes without anybody telling so. It's ridiculous that they cannot handle this reasonably, you don't need 30 fps to share a screen of slowly changing text. It's completely user hostile that there is no message for either the sharer or any participant that sharing has frozen and will never recover. This is paid usage of Google Meet.