Every now and then I work on software close to the bare metal. When I do I am amazed at how fast today’s computers can be, and how slow my laptop feels.
I know this is a developer community, but I think the problem is even worse in the general app/web consumer community at large. Many, many mobile apps and websites seem to think that loading spinners and wait times in the multiple seconds range are acceptable. How many times pre day do we find ourselves waiting (mind drifting) just for our banking app to prompt for login? For our online order confirmation button? For the news article to fully load?
Ads and poor visual design are definitely to blame for some of that, but I don't think all. I find it very discouraging that, with all the hyper-focus on scalability in our industry in the past n years, things seem to have gotten worse; in many cases, an order of magnitude worse. If technologies like k8s, cloud resources, virtualization, etc are so great, why is the general online perceived performance so much worse than it was 10 years ago?
This is precisely why I like working on/in "lower level" things. The perceived disrespect for human time and attention for some additional gain that to me is not relevant at the moment, at least emotionally just stings. Seeing research into the overall effects of the time/completeness trade-off would be interesting. Maybe the drift is worth it over all but it certainly doesn't feel like it.
I do think that hardware and operating system make a noticeable difference in dev tooling performance. On my M3 Macbook, the apps I work on (and Eclipse, by the way) are plenty snappy compared to the same code running on a 2-year-old laptop running Windows. Not trying to rekindle an OS war, just what I've observed many times in recent years.
The JUnit way to run new test first, then recently failing then everything else is really smart 🙂
Every now and then I work on software close to the bare metal. When I do I am amazed at how fast today’s computers can be, and how slow my laptop feels.
I know this is a developer community, but I think the problem is even worse in the general app/web consumer community at large. Many, many mobile apps and websites seem to think that loading spinners and wait times in the multiple seconds range are acceptable. How many times pre day do we find ourselves waiting (mind drifting) just for our banking app to prompt for login? For our online order confirmation button? For the news article to fully load?
Ads and poor visual design are definitely to blame for some of that, but I don't think all. I find it very discouraging that, with all the hyper-focus on scalability in our industry in the past n years, things seem to have gotten worse; in many cases, an order of magnitude worse. If technologies like k8s, cloud resources, virtualization, etc are so great, why is the general online perceived performance so much worse than it was 10 years ago?
Like I said, discouraging.
This is precisely why I like working on/in "lower level" things. The perceived disrespect for human time and attention for some additional gain that to me is not relevant at the moment, at least emotionally just stings. Seeing research into the overall effects of the time/completeness trade-off would be interesting. Maybe the drift is worth it over all but it certainly doesn't feel like it.
Well said. Oh. Gotta go. Replit just finished building a feature 🤪😆
I do think that hardware and operating system make a noticeable difference in dev tooling performance. On my M3 Macbook, the apps I work on (and Eclipse, by the way) are plenty snappy compared to the same code running on a 2-year-old laptop running Windows. Not trying to rekindle an OS war, just what I've observed many times in recent years.