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Comment by bschwindHN | Hacker News Reader

I'm impressed at how the author of this website managed to take plain text content and literally make it slower to load than a 1080p 60FPS video. You really have to try to do something like that, bravo. I normally try to avoid commenting on stuff like this, but that's pretty much all I can say considering it took me actual minutes to load (from Japan).

In lieu of the article's content, I'll spare readers the trouble and provide something better (and faster to load!):

-Read lots of code

There you go, you're well on your way to becoming a code-reading master!

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>how the author of this website managed to take plain text content and literally make it slower to load

I didn't comprehensively debug the whole page but in a cursory 2 minute trace in Chrome Dev Tools, I found javascript that makes an XHR request for a 265k text file[1] with 36000 lines. The javascript code then parses the names (which takes ~300ms) and then seemingly does nothing with the information. It doesn't show up anywhere on any subsequent DOM rewrites. The actual visible content that people read is only 10k.

For mobile users, you punish them twice by (1) subtracting 265k from their data plan and then (2) wasting battery power on cpu to parse it for no reason. That one example of useless bloat is probably multiplied dozens of times elsewhere in the lifecycle of the webpage.

[1] don't click on this if you're on mobile phone: http://wiki.c2.com/names.txt

It doesn't seem to be the JS, though. The request that takes a whoppin' 33 seconds - server-side - for me is http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/TipsForReadingCode

It seems like a list of all the pages on the wiki, presumably to turn mentions of those pages in the text into links automatically. Still, it seems better to do this on the server, if possible.

The irony is that they also host an article about Over Engineering:

http://wiki.c2.com/?OverEngineering

I didn't wait for it to finish loading and actually read it though.

Well I finally loaded it. It's a piece about how the support code (argument parsing, error handling) around the code that "actually does anything" has more lines than the "actually does anything" code.

Wow, you mean just like I spend more time reading specs, quoting, researching, schmoozing with clients etc. than "actually doing work"?

He didn't mean the tasks around programming, he meant the bits of code around the main problem domain in your codebase.

I must admit, this was my first thought too. "Oh look, c2 wiki is back up! Huh, a loading spinner, it must be doing something fancy... oh look, it looks EXACTLY THE SAME AS BEFORE."

The general content seems on track, if obvious ('find the high level logic', 'draw flowcharts if it's complicated', 'grep for whatever you're looking for') but some comments are out of date ("print the code because there's more code space on your desk" no longer applies, I literally have more square centimeters of monitor than of desk space and that monitor area can scroll!) and some are flat-out wrong ("software doesn't always have an entry point"? Really?)

the sad thing is The Wiki (this is the original one) used to be a simple text thingy, with instant load.

I have no idea what happened, but I presume the new version just doesn't handle the HN effect well enough.

> doesn't handle the HN effect well enough.

Not at all.

c2 now uses Federated Wiki, which for engineering reasons (I think), loads the entire wiki tree as a key part of the json that serves as the content for every page.

Looks like new maintainers took control and decided the old codebase wasn't to their liking.

Thing is, these changes come with loads of tradeoffs the newcomers usually are completely oblivious to and the new product is of lesser quality than the original, but they feel good about themselves now :)

I keep JavaScript if on mobile and around 95% of sites still work. This one not so much. If your site is just text please dispense with all the JavaScript.

It was taking me a long time as well (Canada), so I just quit. I thought it was noscript but I allowed the page.

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