The entire intellectual and creative output of a team that reinvented personal computing fits in a space that, today, we wouldn’t think twice about wasting on a single font file.
Somewhere in the years that followed we’ve lost the creative solutions, the art of optimization, that being constrained in that way produces.
The best engineers I’ve worked with carry this instinct even when others might think it crazy. They impose their own constraints. They ask what this would look like if it had to be half the size, or run twice as fast, or use a tenth of the memory. Not because anyone demanded it, but because just by thinking there could be a better, more efficient solution, one often emerges.
If you treat data as a constraint in your design and development process, you’ll likely be able to brainstorm a large number of different ways to keep data usage to a minimum while still providing an excellent experience. Doing less doesn’t mean it has to feel broken.
Rachel takes a look back at twenty years of building on the web. Her conclusion: we’ve internalised constraints that are no longer relevant, and that’s holding us back from exploring new design possibilities:
Somehow the tables have turned. As the web moves on, as we get CSS that gives us the ability to implement designs impossible a few years ago, the web looks more and more like something we could have build with rudimentary CSS for layout. We’ve settled on our constraints and we are staying there, defined by not being print.
The paradox of performance:
This era of incredibly fast hardware is also the era of programs that take tens of seconds to start from an SSD or NVMe disk; of bloated web applications that take many seconds to show a simple list, even on a broadband connection; of programs that process data at a thousandth of the speed we should expect. Software is laggy and sluggish — and the situation shows little signs of improvement. Why is that?
Because we prioritise the developer experience over the user experience, that’s why:
Although our job is ostensibly to create programs that let users do stuff with their computers, we place a greater emphasis on the development process and dev-oriented concerns than on the final user product.
We would do well to heed Craig’s observations on Fast Software, the Best Software.
Focusing on the median or average is the equivalent of walking around with a pair of blinders on. We’re limiting our perspective and, in the process, missing out on so much crucial detail. By definition, when we make improving the median or average our goal, we are focusing on optimizing for only about half of our sessions.
Tim does the numbers…
By honing in on the 90th—or 95th or similar—we ensure those weaknesses don’t get ignored. Our goal is to optimize the performance of our site for the majority of our users—not just a small subset of them.
There are some handy performance tips from Ben in this slide deck.
In this talk we’ll study how browsers determine which requests should be made, in what order, and what prevents the browser from rendering content quickly.