A cool read, and doubly-ironic that it is presented on such a bloated site as medium.com that takes multiple seconds to load on a 1Gbps link
I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
11–20 of 50 posts
Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
#12A cool read, and doubly-ironic that it is presented on such a bloated site as medium.com that takes multiple seconds to load on a 1Gbps link
Author here. The irony wasn’t lost on me haha.
Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
#13Please don’t publish on Medium
Curious why, paywall? Genuinely asking as I have a blog on there, guess it's lazy not to host it myself. It is funny when your mostly un-read blog suddenly is graced by medium and it out of nowhere gets thousands of hits.
Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
#14The main thing I remember from an usability book by Jakob Nielsen is that web pages should fit in 50kb, including all elements. Managing to do this in only 2x that size today, considering that his book was from 1999, may be considered a merit. To put this into another context, today there was a post about Slack's 404 page weighting 50Mb.
There used to be a contest to fit a good web page into 5kB [0]. Seems it stopped running in 2002, to be replaced by a 10kB contest.
Evidently, the entire concept of size & communications efficiency has been abandoned
Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
#15Nice example of a fundamental rule: constraints drive innovation.
"The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination in a tight straitjacket."
-- Feynman
Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
#16I don't do web stuff at all, but I really enjoyed this article. I am convinced that software engineers (not to mention others) have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our brave new world of 32GB memories and fibre-optics. By all means the generous hardware capabilities let us do amazing things, like have a video library, or run massive climate computations, but mostly those resources are piddled away in giant…
An addendum...Back in the 1960s, IBM didn't grok time-sharing. When MIT/Bell Labs looked for a machine with address translation, IBM wasn't interested, so GE got the contract. IBM suddenly realized that they had lost an opportunity, and developed their address translation, which ended up in the IBM 360/67. They also announced an operating system, TSS/360, for this machine. IBM practice was to define memory constraints for their software. So Assembler F would run on a 64K machine, Fortran G on a 128K machine, and so on. The TSS engineers asked how much memory their components were given. They were told “It's virtual memory, use as much as you need.” When the first beta of TSS/360 appeared, an attempt to log in produced the message LOGON IN PROGRESS...for 20 minutes. Eventually, IBM made TSS/360 usable, but by then it was too late. 360/67s ended up running VM/CMS, or 3rd party systems: I had many happy years using the Michigan Terminal System.
Remember, there's a gigabit pathway between server and browser, so use as much of the bandwidth as you need.
Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
#17Please don’t publish on Medium
Curious why, paywall? Genuinely asking as I have a blog on there, guess it's lazy not to host it myself. It is funny when your mostly un-read blog suddenly is graced by medium and it out of nowhere gets thousands of hits.
because it is absolute garbage - I have uBlock Origin WITH a whitelist, and I STILL get a Google sign in popup, AND and half screen Medium popup
Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
#18Please don’t publish on Medium
[deleted]
Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious why, paywall? Genuinely asking as I have a blog on there, guess it's lazy not to host it myself. It is funny when your mostly un-read blog suddenly is graced by medium and it out of nowhere gets thousands of hits.
because it is absolute garbage - I have uBlock Origin WITH a whitelist, and I STILL get a Google sign in popup, AND and half screen Medium popup
Let me show you the light
Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
#20I don't do web stuff at all, but I really enjoyed this article. I am convinced that software engineers (not to mention others) have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our brave new world of 32GB memories and fibre-optics. By all means the generous hardware capabilities let us do amazing things, like have a video library, or run massive climate computations, but mostly those resources are piddled away in giant…
At my deathbed, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to forgive our industry for that. I grew up in the 3rd world where resources where extremely expensive, so my early career was all about doing the most with the resources I had. It was a skill that I had honed so well and now it feels useless and unappreciated. With higher interest rates we see a small degree of it again, but I’m doubtful that hiring managers without that experience will be able to identify it on the wild to pick me.