2 + 2 is 4 regardless of Hitler claiming it over Feynman.
As an example, if a crypo currency executive says their coin is fantastic and everyone should invest in it, but sells their entire holding does one not question the goals of such a statement? Note: this example is also not directly applicable to this article (at least I hope it isn't) but it's closer than your example was.
As I argued, intent has no bearing on the truth value of the claim, but it can – as you point out – be correlated with the truth value. I stand by that dismissing an argument based on intent is fallacious. You have to honestly deal with an argument – regardless of the messenger – to assess its truth value.
* the base page is light but has very high latency (250ms)
* there's an almost-empty CSS (style.css) next to one which seems a bit overwrought (screen.css, 140KB is a lot for a CSS file), oh plus normalize from cloudflare despite it apparently already being included in screen.css
* you're loading 9 different JS files from your CDN, plus some emoji crap from not your CDN
* typekit accounts for 1 JS query followed by fetching 12 different font files, at 15~30K each
* 14 different queries to "driftt.com" whatever the fuck that is though I expect some sort of analytics/tracking crap given
* tracking & analytics & ancillary service queries up the ass: hubspot (4), facebook (4), google analytics (2), drift.com (2), others (5)
* the Lato CSS from google fonts but apparently not the font itself, on the other hand you're loading "larsseit.otf" from your CDN, maybe pick just one?
50 could be "quite low" if most of the requests were for "content" images. TFA has under half a dozen images, as I've outlined in my comment most of the requests are for ancillary garbage.
> I was auditing a big uk ecommerce site at the weekend and the homepage had over 170 elements
See above, 170 is pretty high but assuming at least one image request per product[0] plus a few more for buttons & the like, having a large number of requests would be understandable for an ecommerce site.
ecommerce sites would also be a place where:
1. analytics is very, very understandable
2. the site would use a pretty generic system which could hinder specific optimisations
3. assuming the user will browse around, the site could preload various stuff, sacrificing some upfront performance for a nicer "inside" experience
All in all, I'd be much more understanding of that than 50 request on a blog post, even more so a blog post on software complexity. Incidentally, the amazon.com home page generates ~250 requests.
[0] because spriting for web pages remains a pain in the ass, doubly so for JPEG
https://web.archive.org/web/20120112045920/http://codethinke...
But the content is meh, I couldn't finish reading it and found your comment more interesting than the whole article.