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Performance excuses debunked

computerenhance.com

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Re: Performance excuses debunked

#21

Post by HideousKojima »

globalreset wrote: post #17

Scale / data set size tends to expose performance issues. But that's a good problem to have. Yes, it would be great if all developers could write performant code, but let's face it - there's only so many hours in a day and days in a week. Developers already struggle to keep up with all the required knowledge. It's not that people don't want to be competent. We're building more and more complex things while expanding…

>It's not that people don't want to be competent.

There are plenty of devs that are just there for the paycheck and have minimal passion or interest in learning more.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#22

Post by klodolph »

Also note that “Facebook reduces the storage it needs to store user photos by 50%” is something that contributes, like, nine-figure dollar savings to the bottom line. Facebook does all sorts of crazy stuff to improve performance–I don’t think many people who work there understand how the javascript bundler works, for example. It’s a lot more than something like WebPack.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#23

Post by readthenotes1 »

charlie0 wrote: post #20

Starts off with premise of why performance matters and why you should care. Proceeds to only top 10 biggest tech companies as examples. Are you working in a FAANG? If not, this article does nothing to convince me that I should care about performance (even though I kinda do).

It convinced me that there must be scads of failed attempts that focused on performance first.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#24

Post by omnicognate »

charlie0 wrote: post #20

Starts off with premise of why performance matters and why you should care. Proceeds to only top 10 biggest tech companies as examples. Are you working in a FAANG? If not, this article does nothing to convince me that I should care about performance (even though I kinda do).

He's a games programmer. He's using examples outside his industry to illustrate that his points aren't specific to games (excuse 4). What industry would you like him to talk about?

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#25

Post by phendrenad2 »

> a situation that sometimes happens does not support the use of a statement as a blanket excuse

I feel like pointing this out has become table stakes in any conversation anywhere. Thinking of printing it out on a card and carrying it around.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#26

Post by runlaszlorun »

jiggawatts wrote: post #16
db48x wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean; I’ve made a lot of money by cleaning up other people’s messes. Still, I’m pretty sure I’d prefer a world where software was just better overall and there were fewer messes.

I had a two year stint where I ran around doing "database optimisation" projects that were a week of billable time at consulting rates, and my entire "toolkit" was to simply flip three boolean flags from bad to good values. Now in the public cloud my gimmick is to switch VMs over to current-generation AMD EPYC models, and then collect my pay-check for the "performance tuning". The fruit is hanging so low that I'm tra…

I’ve always enjoyed perf testing and optimization but figured it’d be tough to reliably find clients staying in that niche.

Any tips?

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#27

Post by [deleted] »

globalreset wrote: post #17

Scale / data set size tends to expose performance issues. But that's a good problem to have. Yes, it would be great if all developers could write performant code, but let's face it - there's only so many hours in a day and days in a week. Developers already struggle to keep up with all the required knowledge. It's not that people don't want to be competent. We're building more and more complex things while expanding…

[deleted]

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#28

Post by hikawaii »

HideousKojima wrote: post #21
globalreset wrote: post #17

Scale / data set size tends to expose performance issues. But that's a good problem to have. Yes, it would be great if all developers could write performant code, but let's face it - there's only so many hours in a day and days in a week. Developers already struggle to keep up with all the required knowledge. It's not that people don't want to be competent. We're building more and more complex things while expanding…

>It's not that people don't want to be competent. There are plenty of devs that are just there for the paycheck and have minimal passion or interest in learning more.

It's often not about learning more, the techniques and methods in Casey Muratori's streams are often very well understood and even taught in school.

Dismissing people as just being there for the paycheck - that's you and every other developer.

The number of people who produce useful OSS projects because they just like the project and aren't filling out resume points to hope bigtech senpai notices them is astronomically small, and usually the sort of political project nobody wants to touch.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#29

Post by kragen »

omnicognate wrote: post #24
charlie0 wrote: post #20

Starts off with premise of why performance matters and why you should care. Proceeds to only top 10 biggest tech companies as examples. Are you working in a FAANG? If not, this article does nothing to convince me that I should care about performance (even though I kinda do).

He's a games programmer. He's using examples outside his industry to illustrate that his points aren't specific to games (excuse 4). What industry would you like him to talk about?

smes doing hourly contract crud development

startups

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#30

Post by kragen »

tmtvl wrote: post #7

I like the positive message he leaves us with: the barrier to entry for good performance is as low as it's ever been. You can get good performance without needing hand-coded assembly SIMD vector optimizations.

also tho the barrier to entry for hand-coded assembly simd vector optimizations is as low as it's ever been
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