Siërra R., "Botfly Mother "Inhaling The Sodium Vapors""

modern browsers are fast, mobile websites are good
everyone makes their sites using bajigabyte-sized Frameworks (u2122™)
mobile websites are slow
everyone makes native apps instead, because they're fast and responsive
maintaining 3 versions of frontend code is expensive, so build everything with react, electron, etc etc
mobile apps are also slow and unresponsive

cohost is so much faster just by not following the past several years of nonsensical industry trends, it's so funny

gabby @fullmoon1/7/2023, 2:53 PM

The curse of optimization

This actually highlights a very common phenomenon that I see all the time as someone who works on developer productivity

The way a lot of managers think about improving developer productivity goes something like this:

"If we invest 5% of our engineers towards improving developer productivity and they improve productivity conservatively by 10% then that's a net win. Everyone lives happily ever after"

NOPE!!!

#engineering #management

James Munns @jamesmunns1/7/2023, 5:35 PM

Also known as

This phenomena has been described as a version of Parkinson's Law

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in reply to @gwenverbsnouns's post:

Kat @AnEvilHerbivore1/7/2023, 7:14 AM

That has...not been my experience. Cohost is actually one of the slowest websites I use.

Not unusably slow, obviously, but it often takes a second or 2 for pages to load.

Kat A. Beckett @KaterinaBucket1/7/2023, 1:11 PM

I think ALL the time about how I'll go to a bunch of websites that aren't really doing anything useful (at least not useful to me) that the same or similar sites weren't doing in 2010, while using hardware and an internet connection way better than anything I had in 2010, only for everything to take several times longer than it did in 2010

in reply to @fullmoon's post:

Annette @weeble1/7/2023, 9:03 PM

Hmmm, so under this hypothesis, what actually moderates, say, build time? Like, why does it become "avaiable" to spend at that point and not before?

gabby @fullmoon1/7/2023, 9:22 PM

As build times get slower, development slows down and people become more conscientious of build performance

David @hllizi1/8/2023, 12:02 PM

So there appears to be some implicit notion of a build time that is OK, doesn't there? Anything that's left available due to faster builds is used to do more fancy stuff and anything above the OK time leads to people becoming more careful. Then an interesting question seems to be: is it possible to change the implicit notion of OK build time to make people actually want faster builds?

gabby @fullmoon1/8/2023, 2:34 PM

I think that's somewhat related to the cultural emphasis on efficiency. If there's a general expectation that CI should be faster then people will tend to be more conscientious about not slowing it down and also report/prioritize fixing issues earlier

in reply to @jamesmunns's post:

gwen @gwenverbsnouns1/7/2023, 6:27 PM

someone else mentioned wirth's law and jevon's paradox

James Munns @jamesmunns1/7/2023, 7:23 PM

ohhhh those are good too! Parkinson's law got mentioned in a book I read this week, so it was fresher in my mind. I'm sure Systemantics has a witty name for the concept as well.

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