201–210 of 423 posts
Just amazed that ‘better testing’ isn’t one of the takeaways in the summary. Just amazed. Yea ‘write code carefully’ as if suggesting that’ll fix it is a rookie mistake. So so frustrating when developers treat user machines like their test bed!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While we're listing complaints... 250MB for a screen recorder update?
That’s pretty much the floor for an Electron app. If you’re a small shop or solo dev, it is real hard to justify going native on three platforms when electron gives it for (near) free. And outside of HN, no one seems to blink at a 250MB bundle. There are alternatives like Tauri that use the system browser and allow substantially smaller bundles, but they’re not nearly as mature as Electron, and you will get cross pla…
I can remember when I would have to leave a 250MB download running overnight.
Before that, I can remember when it would have filled my primary hard drive more than six times over.
... Why can't the app-specific code just get plugged into a common, reusable Electron client?
For me this shows once again that proper testing is neglected by many developers and companies. Sadly, it is not even mentioned in the advice at the end of the article.
It's best to save everyone by writing tests that prevent a $100 issue on your machine from becoming a costly $10M+ problem in production as the product scales after it has launched.
This won't be the last time and this is what 'vibe coding' doesn't consider and it it will introduce more issues like this.
In comparison, when I shipped a Mac desktop application: We used Sparkle, https://sparkle-project.org/ , to do our updates. IMO, it was a poor choice to "roll their own" updater. Our application was very complicated and shipped with Mono... And it was only about ~10MB. The Windows version of our application was ~2MB and included both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. WTF are they doing shipping a 250MB screen recorder? So,…
In comparison, when I shipped a Mac desktop application: We used Sparkle, https://sparkle-project.org/ , to do our updates. IMO, it was a poor choice to "roll their own" updater. Our application was very complicated and shipped with Mono... And it was only about ~10MB. The Windows version of our application was ~2MB and included both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. WTF are they doing shipping a 250MB screen recorder? So,…
People are willing to trade performance/size for convenience. Writing your application using Electron + React means it is going to probably ship a > 500mb app that will suck up 500mb ram while running, but you have a much easier dev experience and can deliver a "flashy" UI with minimal effort.
For people finding this thread via web search in the future: screen.studio is macOS screen recording software that checks for updates every five minutes. Somehow, that alone is NOT the bug described in this post. The /other/ bug described in this blog is: their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes. The software developers there consider all of this normal except the actual download, which c…
> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes
I assume most of that 2PB network traffic was not egress, right? Otherwise how did it "only" cost you $8k on Google Cloud? Even at a cost of 0.02$ per GB, which is usually a few times lower than the actual prices I could find there, that would still result in an invoice of about $40k...
For people finding this thread via web search in the future: screen.studio is macOS screen recording software that checks for updates every five minutes. Somehow, that alone is NOT the bug described in this post. The /other/ bug described in this blog is: their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes. The software developers there consider all of this normal except the actual download, which c…
When I built an app that “phones home” regularly, I added the ability for the backend to respond to the client with an override backoff that the client would respect over the default.