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Engineering for Slow Internet

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Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#341

Post by langsoul-com »

daveoc64 wrote: post #151
langsoul-com wrote: post #129

Too bad only US has starlink active. Other nations, like Australia, has nothing...

Starlink is available in something like 40 countries, including Australia. Unless you're specifically talking about bases in Antarctica?

Yeah I'm talking about Antarctica. I was really thinking about going there, just to see how it is. But the lack thereof proper net puts me off.

No different from regional Australia, which ALWAYS has some crippling addiction, whether it's alcohol, domestic violence or something else. Not the best environment.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#342

Post by arvinsim »

padolsey wrote: post #43

A lot of this resonates. I'm not in Antartica, I'm in Beijing, but still struggle with the internet. Being behind the great firewall means using creative approaches. VPNs only sometimes work, and each leaves a signature that the firewall's hueristics and ML can eventually catch onto. Even state-mandated ones are 'gently' limited at times of political sensitivity. It all ends up meaning that, even if I get a connectio…

Devs only build for the requirements they are given.

You want performance? Then include it in the requirements and give it the necessary time budget in a project.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#343

Post by arvinsim »

zerkten wrote: post #188
rpastuszak wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in Shoreditch for 7 years and most of my flats had almost 3G internet speeds. The last one had windows that incidentally acted like a faraday cage. I always test my projects with throttled bandwidth, largely because (just like with a11y) following good practices results in better UX for all users, not just those with poor connectivity. Edit: Another often missed opportunity is building SPAs as offline-first.

>> Another often missed opportunity is building SPAs as offline-first. You are going to get so many blank stares at many shops building web apps when suggesting things like this. This kind of consideration doesn't even enter into the minds of many developers in 2024. Few of the available resources in 2024 address it that well for developers coming up in the industry. Back in the early-2000s, I recall these kinds of t…

The irony for me is that I got into React because I thought that we could finally move to an offline-first SPA application. Current trends seem to go the opposite.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#344

Post by arvinsim »

mike_hearn wrote: post #261
Sesse__ wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CSS is a very inefficient way to represent styling logic which is why web devs write dialects like sass that are more compact, but browsers don't adopt it. I don't know exactly which features you are referring to, but you may have noticed that CSS has adopted native nesting, very similarly to Sass, but few sites actually use it. Functions and mixins are similar compactness/convenience topics being worked on by the…

I hadn't noticed and I guess this is part of the problem. Sorry this post turned into a bit of a rant but I wrote it now. When it was decided that HTML shouldn't be versioned anymore it became impossible for anyone who isn't a full time and very conscientious web dev to keep up. Versions are a signal, they say "pay attention please, here is a nice blog post telling you the most important things you need to know". If…

> Oh and then there's magic like Tailwind. Gah.

I'm not sure why Tailwind is magic. It's just a bunch of predefined classes at its core.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#345

Post by djtango »

erinaceousjones wrote: post #98
toast0 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet that WhatsApp is one of the rare services you use which actually deployed servers to Australia. To me, 200ms is a telltale sign of intercontinental traffic. So, I used to work at WhatsApp. And we got this kind of praise when we only had servers in Reston, Virginia (not at aws us-east1, but in the same neighborhood). Nowadays, Facebook is most likely terminating connections in Australia, but messaging most lik…

WhatsApp is (or was) using XMPP for the chat part too, right? When I was IT person on a research ship, WhatsApp was a nice easy one to get working with our "50+ people sharing two 256kbps uplinks" internet. Big part of that was being able to QoS prioritise the XMPP traffic which WhatsApp was a big part of. Not having to come up with filters for HTTPS for IP ranges belonging to general-use CDNs that managed to hit the…

Yes - a thousand yeses.

I once got asked "what was a life changing company/product" and my answer was WhatsApp - to slightly bemused looks.

WhatsApp connected the world for free. Obviously they weren't the first to try but when my (very globally distributed family) picked up WhatsApp in '09/'10 we knew we were onto something different. Being able to stay in touch with my brother half way across the world in realtime was very special. Nothing else at the time really competed. SMS was expensive and had latency. Email felt clunky and oddly formal - email clients don't feel "chatty". MSN was crap on mobile and you both had to be online. Ditto for Skype. For calls we even used to do this odd VOIP bridge where you would each call an endpoint for cheap international phone calls.

Meanwhile in 2012, I was able to install WhatsApp on my mum's old Nokia Symbian feature phone, use WhatsApp on a pay-as-you-go sim plan in Singapore communicating over WAP. The data consumption was so low I basically survived 2 months on maybe 1-2 top ups. Compare that with the other day where I turned on roaming on my phone (so I could connect to Singtel to BUY a roaming package) and my phone passively fetched ~50+ MB in seconds and I was hit with 400SGD of data charges (I was able to get them refunded)

I am very grateful to all the work and thought WhatsApp put into building an affordable global resilient communication network and I hope every one of the people involved got the payout they deserve.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#346

Post by kellpossible2 »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #330
nrabulinski wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, right. GitHub migrated from serving static sites to displaying everything dynamically and it’s basically unusable nowadays. Unbelievably long load times, frustratingly unresponsive, and that’s on my top spec m1 MacBook Pro connected to a router with fiber connection. Let’s not kid ourselves, no matter how many fancy features, splitting, optimizing, whatever you do, JS webapps may be an upgrade for developers, t…

Between massacring the UX and copilot I've more or less stopped engaging with github. I got tempted the other day to comment on an issue and it turns out the brain trust over at Microsoft broke threaded comment replies. They still haven't fixed keyboard navigation in their bullshit text widget. I could put up with the glacial performance if it actually worked in the first place, but apparently adding whiz bang "AI" f…

Surprisingly my experience of GitLab is even worse! How's yours? BitBucket wasn't much better from memory either. Seems like most commercial offerings in this spaces suck.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#347

Post by lukan »

KETHERCORTEX wrote: post #340
lukan wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I feel like some devs need to time-travel back to 2005 or something and develop for that era in order to learn how to build things nimbly." No need to invent time travel, just let them have a working retreat somewhere with only bad mobile connection for a few days.

There's no need for retreat. Chrome DevTools have "simulate slow connection" button.

Yeah - and do they use it? Does it help experiencing them the joy of wanting just a little text information, but having to load loads of other stuff first and your connection timing out? I am afraid to get the full experience, they actually need to have a bad connection.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#348

Post by nicbou »

FerretFred wrote: post #305

A fascinating article and I need to revisit this when I have more time. So, all I'd say now is that there's way too much emphasis on GUI. Also, check out some of the web sites on https://1mb.club - it's amazing what can be achieved in less than 1Mb of HTML ...

1 MB is comically large. 150 kb is a much more interesting target.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#349

Post by greenish_shores »

anthk wrote: post #323
greenish_shores wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, statistically average end-user internet connection in Europe is much faster than in the US. Maybe outside some places like most of western Germany, but these are an exception. Europe has really good bandwidth speeds, overall. I absolutely agree with the rest, though, including the part saying any "serious" software will have such features (and better support in general), and I second the examples you gave.

USA it's huge and sparse, but Spain it's the same, it's like USA.rar. Crowded coasts, lots of mountains with a rough interior almost as empty as Lapland modulo Madrid. So, yes, you can have the issues on phone signal issues.

Phone signal? Okay. I thought we're talking about fixed broadband connections.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#350

Post by anthk »

greenish_shores wrote: post #349
anthk wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA it's huge and sparse, but Spain it's the same, it's like USA.rar. Crowded coasts, lots of mountains with a rough interior almost as empty as Lapland modulo Madrid. So, yes, you can have the issues on phone signal issues.

Phone signal? Okay. I thought we're talking about fixed broadband connections.

Ditto; I don't think fiber it's available at $LOST_REMOTE_FARMLAND_VILLAGE.
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