I work sometimes in frontend and mostly in backend but I cant still comprehend why are we going backwards. shouldnt the websites be so optimized that they should be able to run in normal pc / smartphone rather than s23 is failing to load it. I guess at least bigger companies have that kind of resource for optimization but still not doing it why?
Any hardware gains and more are used up by stuffing in additional telemetry, ad/engagement scripts, and animations. Devs have grown up on "unused RAM is wasted RAM," work on the latest high-spec Macs, and get incentivized by higher-ups demanding things be ever "modernized" and not to waste time on optimization, which they see as annoying nerd stuff. But even that doesn't explain everything I guess, because I still see a lot of these things in open source projects.
The explanation for bloated OSS is that the software development field has opened up to be accessible to non-programmers. There are at least 10x as many developers publishing software now as there were in the 90s, and the class of people who know how a CPU works are a tiny, tiny minority of the field now, where 30 years ago it was the norm. The vast majority of developers operate on 15 layers of abstractions and are literally offended by the idea that they should understand even a single layer below the one they're currently on. They will invoke a retort like "might as well learn assembly while you're at it", which I have heard literally dozens of times by now, as though it is actually unreasonable to have an understanding of assembly even if you don't write it every day.
Game development suffers greatly from this, too. So many games run like dogshit and some take literally 100+ GB more disk space than they need to (with the counterfactual proven when a dev eventually "optimizes" their game 3 years later by doing some really trivial thing, like what hapened with Helldivers 2 and some other game I can't recall). There is a whole generation of "Unity devs" and "Unreal devs" who work no-code or as close to it as possible, only being able to develop games through a GUI and light scripting, with even the latter usually involving copy-pasting existing scripts written by other people and tweaking the numbers.
In some ways this is a good thing, of course. There are a lot of useful software and fun games in the world that would not have been created if software development were not accessible. But with the cost to performance and security breaches becoming the absolute norm, I do really wish there was a culture for developers to continue improving, to continue learning, instead of a culture of learning the very top of the stack, declaring it good enough, and becoming a "React dev" for the rest of their career instead of becoming "a programmer" who can use more than one abstraction.
Who pissed in your Java this morning, gramps? Performance has nothing to do with whether you’re “the programmer” (whatever that means, I assume that’s what you consider yourself among this sea of mediocrity around you) and “React dev”. It’s all about incentives, and truth is that performance isn’t very high priority for majority of software.
There are very, very strong incentives for performance. Google and other hyperscalers have done studies on their data at scale (and boy do they have a lot of data), and even delays measured in low hundreds of milliseconds harm user retention. On the backend side, 1% improvements in performance can translate to millions of dollars in reduced costs at scale annually. There simply are not enough qualified programmers in the world creating performant software.
With open source it's not even about incentives. I still put effort into the software I make on my own time because I create the kind of software I want to see in the world, ie. software that doesn't feel miserable to use. It's simply about culture. People build up assembly and lower-level abstractions in general to be the scary monster in their closet, and not something they could actually learn if they just tried.
> There are very, very strong incentives for performance. Google and other hyperscalers have done studies on their data at scale (and boy do they have a lot of data), and even delays measured in low hundreds of milliseconds harm user retention. On the backend side, 1% improvements in performance can translate to millions of dollars in reduced costs at scale annually.
for Google and other hyperscalers, not for mom and pop shops and electron apps.
> There simply are not enough qualified programmers in the world creating performant software.
Nonsense. You seriously think there’s some arcane knowledge in optimizing things? Sure, if you’re pushing microseconds and optimizing network stack just to squeeze last drops out of it. But majority of software runs stupid quadratic loops, overuses map/filter/reduce, instantiates too much and is bloated with useless features. It takes one capable programmer to optimize this mess to roughly 90-98% of what’s possible. It takes world class to squeeze last 2%, but majority of software doesn’t need or care about it.
No, I don't think there's particularly arcane knowledge in optimizing things! That's rather my point. It's not even hard to learn, but the current developer culture is one that treats learning anything outside of their framework as a bogeyman. There are real game developers, with jobs, who are paid many tens of thousands of dollars, who do not even know what an "int" is, because it's all been abstracted away for them and they think that understanding why their game runs like shit is something only Carmack himself could handle. In reality, we could easily produce enough capable programmers to create performant software, we simply choose not to as a culture.
> but the current developer culture is one that treats learning anything outside of their framework as a bogeyman.
You can neither prove or disprove this statement. Just my 10c: I’m working in payments and not a stranger to optimization of both native and managed code. I can easily improve our POI performance by at least 20-30% across different metrics in a span of couple of weeks. Why don’t I do that? Because not only management wouldn’t praise me, but they would actively work against me because it’s not a priority.
> You can neither prove or disprove this statement.
It's self-evident from interacting with a wide range of developers, but I suppose I can prove it no more than I can prove to you the sky is blue. I'm not saying there aren't cases like yours of "I could optimize it, but I'm not being paid to". But there are also many, many cases of "Are you crazy? I would have to spend my entire life learning about CPUs, compilers, assembly, and programming languages! Get real, nobody can do that unless they're a 1% genius" for things that they could absolutely learn to do if they just tried instead of living in fear of it.
TBH i needed this when i was working on my undergrad thesis with ECC and ECDHA but thanks author for making this. Helped me remember all the fundamentals.
My source of learning is trying weird ideas. I wanted to learn about agents and how they worked, so I built an autonomous consensus based set of AI agents with no human intervention to build a software collective.
In that process, I learned interesting things about how agents work. Then I used those ideas, to build agents for other tasks, and I have been working on improving those with other weird ideas.
Through these process, I develop opinions about how they work. They may be incorrect, but it gives me a certain kind of insight into them, and how to adjust them.
I have silly question to anyone here who is willing to answer
I truly understand it takes unreasonable amount of time and dedicated focused effort to get good at something. But why is there any explanation for it? I know about the traditional neuro-sci explanation of myelin[1].
So my question is, is there any research on how to reduce this time? Like we all know life is short and as human we have interest in many things and we should specialize and try to go deep in one craft.But is there any way of getting closed to that master level performance in short practice-perfomance cycle
I so much agree with you. I understand and remember the things I learn more when I am having fun or it piqued my curiosity. But I guess shortness of time needs us to focus on the efficiency aspect of it too.
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