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A comment on Optimizing Your Web App 100x Is Like Adding 99 Servers. Parent comment

Re:Optimizing Your Web App 100x Is Like Adding 99 Servers by choeger on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:55AM (#25168573)
That has nothing to do with talent IMO. Every software engineer worth their salt should be able to inspect a full stack, measure and evaluate the performance. Instead you have 80% people stuck in whatever the current fashion is (js, I look at you) and that cannot tell a png from a .so .

So in the end, it is more about attitude, not talent.

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Re:Optimizing Your Web App 100x Is Like Adding 99 Servers by freshhawk on Saturday November 21, 2020 @06:35AM (#25169122)
Agreed. When we focus on the part of the spectrum of optimizations that do require talent, we're thinking of the exceptional, interesting, makes-a-viral-post-on-HN stuff.

The bulk of the work, in my experience, is simpler than the programming part. It's just a culture/priority thing. Like how most of the industry used to not use source control. Now we do, we didn't need to add "talent" to get that done either.

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Re:Optimizing Your Web App 100x Is Like Adding 99 Servers by vendiddy on Saturday November 21, 2020 @10:15AM (#25170136)
I agree. One heuristic is the specs of our computers 20 years ago had.

Those computers were an order of magnitude slower. Yet many equivalent apps today run at about the same speed.

Performance is not being prioritized. And I suppose back then, devs had no choice given the resource constraints they had.

I've seen many times devs paying for larger databases instance without first even taking a few hours to try and optimize their queries.

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Re:Optimizing Your Web App 100x Is Like Adding 99 Servers by xxpor on Saturday November 21, 2020 @10:42AM (#25170262)
The depressing part of all of this is performance optimization is really fun! I love sitting down with flamegraphs and other profiler output and making things faster.
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Re:Optimizing Your Web App 100x Is Like Adding 99 Servers by otabdeveloper4 on Sunday November 22, 2020 @06:52AM (#25176744)
> software engineer worth their salt...

...is a scotsman that doesn't exist.

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