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I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

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Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#31

Post by Exoristos »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #25
vincent-manis wrote: post #4

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…

Partial answer: Understanding of and peace with ourselves as humans. Human skill and discipline are long-lasting challenges that satisfy. Those who have not experienced the process of improving the self over years of practice are prone to unease and depression.

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#32

Post by rcxdude »

vincent-manis wrote: post #30
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Quick answer: is our software any more usable, any more reliable, than it was 50 years ago? The more code you write, the more dependencies you require, the more opportunity for bugs and design errors to creep in. I get the impression that many software projects have enough fixes and kludges slathered on them to make them work nowadays. (Remember Bill Atkinson's famous response, quoted here to how much code he'd writt…

It's much more capable, that's the main thing. Reliability and usability tend not to be valued in the market much, but being able to do more things is.

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#33

Post by soundofvictory »

Maybe i'm dumb, but I really don't understand the point of this post.

Why even make it "reactive"? Just make your site static server-rendered pages? Or just static pages. Is it because additional-content-loading is something users expect?

"Write your site in plain javascript and html. Don't use a framework. Write some minimal css. Bamo. Well under 128kb." ???

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#34

Post by eska »

Making a website is what made me interested in programming as a 10 year old during the dot com bubble. Even back then I realized very quickly that webdev is a cargo cult and I switched to C and assembly to learn how to program “real” programs. Even now, almost 30 years later, I can make high quality software based on technology from back then (compared to the constant dependency drift nowadays in webdev). It’s just a constant assault by young programmers who don’t know better in webdev.

Some years ago I made a website again. Screw best practices, I used my systems engineering skills and the browser’s debugger. I had written game engines with soft realtime physics simulations and global illumination over the network. I knew what computers could do. This website would render within 1 frame at 60 FPS without any layout recalculation, garbage collection events, web requests that can’t be parallelized without dependencies etc.

I showed it to friends. They complained it doesn’t work. They didn’t realize that once they clicked, the site displayed the next content instantly (without any weird js tricks). This was a site with a fully responsive and complex looking design. The fact that users are SO used to terrible UX made me realize that I was right about this industry all along as a child.

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#35

Post by socalgal2 »

vincent-manis wrote: post #30
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Quick answer: is our software any more usable, any more reliable, than it was 50 years ago? The more code you write, the more dependencies you require, the more opportunity for bugs and design errors to creep in. I get the impression that many software projects have enough fixes and kludges slathered on them to make them work nowadays. (Remember Bill Atkinson's famous response, quoted here to how much code he'd writt…

> is our software any more usable ... than it was 50 years ago?

Yes, by several orders of magnitude. I couldn't enter or display Japanese or on my Atari 800 nor Apple 2 nor C64 (sorry, only 45 years ago). I couldn't display 200+ large 24bit images with ease (heres 100: https://www.flickr.com/groups/worldofarchitecture/pool/). Or try this: https://scrolldit.com/

I couldn't play 16 videos simultaneously while downloading stuff in the background and and playing a game. I could go on and on but my computer today is vastly more usable than any of my computers 40 years ago that could only effectively run one app at a time and I had to run QEMM and edit my config.sys and autoexec.bat to try to optimized my EMS and XMS memory cards.

I love that I can display a video as simple as

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#36

Post by AdieuToLogic »

toss1 wrote: post #14
gmuslera wrote: post #3

The 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 [0] https://www.the5k.org/about.php

> There used to be a contest to fit a good web page into 5kB ...

In accordance with this philosophy, I worked on a project a couple years ago where the HTML home page uncompressed size was intentionally limited to 4k. The idea being a slow network connection (such as a mobile device using a limited cellular connection) would be able to render quickly and remaining content could load asynchronously.

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#37

Post by brailsafe »

I'm about halfway through the read so far, but wanted to vome back and say that these were/are some of most interesting challenges to overcome and constraints to work within, when I was coming up as a web person. Inspired by agencies like Clear Left, I'd seek out old af devices with comically bad browsers, tiny screens, and obtuse input methods. Unfortunately I never really found a financially rewarding enough path to continue pursuing that; the constraint on most projects that don't have these super tight requirements baked in, is money, time, and looking good, which meant that I could either accept that as a survival mechanism and throw JS at CSS problems, or I could lose my job. Although it's neat that over the years of my incredibly shaky career, I've moved from web designer/developer to f̵a̵k̵e̵ software engineer, I've never found UI programming to be quite as rewarding as making an incredibly fast and responsive and pretty and robust website.

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#38

Post by toss1 »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #36
toss1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 [0] https://www.the5k.org/about.php

> There used to be a contest to fit a good web page into 5kB ... In accordance with this philosophy, I worked on a project a couple years ago where the HTML home page uncompressed size was intentionally limited to 4k. The idea being a slow network connection (such as a mobile device using a limited cellular connection) would be able to render quickly and remaining content could load asynchronously.

I wish everyone would do the same!

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#39

Post by analog31 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #25
vincent-manis wrote: post #4

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…

I'm a scientist, working adjacent to a team of engineers.

My sense is that there's a "conceptual" austerity, due to the limited ability of the human mind to understand complex systems. The programmers are satisfied that the product is documented, because it passes tests, and "the source code expresses what the program does." But nobody can explain it to me, in situations where I have to be involved because something has gone wrong.

The system has surpassed some threshold of conceptual austerity when the majority of the devs have concluded that the only hope is to scrap it and start over, but they can't, because they don't know what it's supposed to do, and can't find out.

On the other hand, the infinite computer would take care of this for us too. We're faced with semi-infinite computers at the present time, that can be filled to the brim with stuff that they can't themselves understand or manage. But all real things are finite.

Re: I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since

#40

Post by arp242 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #25
vincent-manis wrote: post #4

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…

> I still think we'd all be better off with infinitely fast, infinitely resourced computers. IMO, austerity offers no benefit.

Well, sure. But these computers don't exist, so that doesn't really matter.

The main reason I bought a new laptop last year is because the frontend build process needed about 5G of RAM and ~4 minutes, which was a real productivity-killed. I'm not a frontend dev, I inherited all of this, and wasn't so easy to fix for both technical and organisational reasons.

Excessive austerity offers no benefit, I agree, but some projects are out of control in their resource usage, and impose a real burden with it.

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