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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
Author here. The irony wasn’t lost on me haha.
Please don’t publish on Medium
But, damn, that was some fun stuff. Really challenging to get the graphical results we wanted and keep it under budget (15 KB in the early days).
It's really satisfying.
Ironic that simplified accessibility view doesn't work on this page
Firefox reader mode works ok for me. Chromium tells me there was 2.5mB of downstream traffic to load the page, rising to 4.3 if I scroll to the Recommended from Medium spam at the bottom of the page. That would be appalling if the bar weren't so low. I'm reminded of The Website Obesity Crisis , [0] where the author mentions reading an article about web bloat, then noticing that page was not exactly a shining example…
I 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…
I'll bite. What do you think we've lost? What would the benefit be of using resources more frugally?
Disclosure: I'm an embedded systems programmer. I frequently find myself in the position where I have to be very careful with my usage of CPU cycles and memory resources. I still think we'd all be better off with infinitely fast, infinitely resourced computers. IMO, austerity offers no benefit.
Earlier 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
uBlock Filters EasyList EasyPrivacy Online Malicious URL Blocklist Peter Lowe's Ad and tracking server list EasyList - Annoyances
Suggesting that an application should stay within a 128KB limit is akin to saying I enjoy playing games in polygon mode. Battlezone was impressive in the 90s, but today, it wouldn't meet user expectations.
In my opinion, initial load time is a better measure of performance. It combines both the initial application size and the time to interactivity.
Achieving this is much more complex. There are many strategies to reduce initial load size and improve time to interactivity, such as lazy loading, using a second browser process to run code, or minimizing requests altogether. However, due to this complexity, it's also much easier to make mistakes.
Another reason this is often not done well is that it requires cross-team collaboration and cross-domain knowledge. It necessitates both frontend and backend adjustments, as well as optimisation at the request and response levels. And it is often a non-functional requirement like accessibility that is hard to track for a lot of teams.
I 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…
> I really wonder whether we've lost something by not making more of an effort to use resources more frugally I'll bite. What do you think we've lost? What would the benefit be of using resources more frugally? Disclosure: I'm an embedded systems programmer. I frequently find myself in the position where I have to be very careful with my usage of CPU cycles and memory resources. I still think we'd all be better off w…
(Remember Bill Atkinson's famous response, quoted here to how much code he'd written that week: -3000. He had reworked Quickdraw so that it was faster and better, with a net loss of 3000 lines of code.) Of course the classic Mac had its own constraints.