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How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

performance.dev

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Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#211

Post by kardianos »

ricardobeat wrote: post #91

I would always hear about how Linear was fast, but after actually working daily with it, I’ve lost enthusiasm. Search is quite slow, the UI is often clunky (looks good though), “Pulse” is a torrent of noise even at small scale, and I have trouble finding things I need and resort to adding everything to favorites. Early days’ Trello was the best project tracking experience by far.

I tried linear demo and many other task tracker/issue trackers. Many of them were just that: "fine" but then wanted a large pricing increase for OIDC connectors or similar.

The core issue isn't hard so I built my own, native OIDC auth, status, comments, plus I made communication a first class citizen, tracked it its own status workflow. Another nice thing I like is that status has attached a workflow that associates actions with a status transitions and task screens are defined in data. All APIs go through a single endpoint that can be intrinsically combined into batches. Still fast. It isn't that great, but I like it so much better then any of these commercial offerings.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#213

Post by benjaminwootton »

20k wrote: post #181
ricardobeat wrote: post #91

I would always hear about how Linear was fast, but after actually working daily with it, I’ve lost enthusiasm. Search is quite slow, the UI is often clunky (looks good though), “Pulse” is a torrent of noise even at small scale, and I have trouble finding things I need and resort to adding everything to favorites. Early days’ Trello was the best project tracking experience by far.

Trello is still my goto for everything. I sincerely hope that it doesn't get enshittified

You can vibe code a clone of Trello in 30 minutes.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#215

Post by Aurornis »

ricardobeat wrote: post #91

I would always hear about how Linear was fast, but after actually working daily with it, I’ve lost enthusiasm. Search is quite slow, the UI is often clunky (looks good though), “Pulse” is a torrent of noise even at small scale, and I have trouble finding things I need and resort to adding everything to favorites. Early days’ Trello was the best project tracking experience by far.

I’ve been underwhelmed, too.

Whatever they did to market the product worked amazingly well, because I see it being suggested all the time even by people who haven’t used it! Their marketing has established it as the fast alternative, so every complaint about slow project management elicits a suggestion from someone to try Linear. Then you ask them about their own experience with Linear and either they haven’t used it or didn’t use it for more than a few hours on a side project.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#216

Post by blanched »

port11 wrote: post #202
s08148692 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used it for a couple of years now and honestly the hype around it is really unjustified. It does the job but it's nothing special. I could go back to Jira and see no change in productivity after a brief re-orientation period

The comparison to Jira is unfair, Jira is known for abysmal performance. Linear was really, incredibly fast. We adopted it in 2021 and it was amazing. Now it’s bloated. That’s the standard path for most software (Zawinski’s Law), and I’m not very excited when they ship another feature. Most of the new stuff isn’t for small players, they’re more of an alternative for medium and large businesses.

I think it depends on your job/role. Unless you're spending literally all day in Jira, I don't think the performance (or even more broadly, the enjoyment) of one's task tracker affects productivity that much.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#217

Post by jitl »

lucaspiller wrote: post #169
jitl wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can home tenants in a data center close to them, run a copy of your app in each region including the datastore. keep a central db for accounts, billing, etc but user content is easy enough to shard regionally. taken to extreme, cloudflare durable objects & workers let you place data very close to a tenant automatically; but you lose total write throughput on top of sqlite.

This breaks down when someone goes on holiday to Greece for a week, and the RTT over the airbnb wifi is 5 seconds. Optimistic updates on the frontend are probably simpler too.

oh for sure you start with client side cache & optimistic updates. but u need low latency / regional backend for multiplayer to feel good. I didn’t realize who i was replying to, aaron is probably one of the few people who think about sync engines more than me. anyways we do both at notion and of course we did local cache first client way before we did multi region at Notion.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#218

Post by kobieps »

thingortwo wrote: post #210
aboodman wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do support Replicache: https://i.imgur.com/R1pR58i.png . But I get it. Unfortunately something like this cannot be a sidecar, or at least I do not know how to make it one. It's central to your app in the way that React is. Fortunately the category is expanding and there are several sync engines that plug in exactly how Zero does - by replicating your database. You can switch between them easily. So as long as you…

Which is exactly why I said this problem is better solved by your own custom sync engine which when scoped to your own problem is not as hard to build as you think the most simpler and effective version is just a change_log and replaying or occasional full sync. My own app uses something like this and I have yet to encounter any issue whereas I did initially look into using electricsql , zero sync , instantdb , tripl…

Did you look at PowerSync? It's "just" SQLite on the client. Wound be curious to hear what you think of it in the context of your lock in concerns

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#219

Post by matharmin »

devnull3 wrote: post #191

How do these ideas work for domains which need encryption at rest? (e.g Healthcare, fintech, etc)? Lack of native encryption in indexedDB is a dealbreaker for certain use-cases.

At PowerSync we use a wa-sqlite build with SQLite3MultipleCiphers for encryption at rest.

You do still need a secure key to use with this. The simplest is to persist the key server-side (and specifically not on the client), and provide it to the JS after signing in. If you need to support a completely offline PWA you need something else, e.g. prompting the user for a passcode each load.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#220

Post by stackedinserter »

nilirl wrote: post #56

Am I the only that doesn't "get" Linear? Even if speed is the killer feature, isn't an issue tracker a relatively low-frequency application for a dev? Whenever I use it, I don't feel like I'm doing anything new when compared to all the other issue trackers and Kanban boards I've used before.

I don't understand it either. How can "Jira but faster" be a selling point?
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