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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

"I feel like some devs need to time-travel back to 2005 or something and develop for that era in order to learn how to build things nimbly."

No need to invent time travel, just let them have a working retreat somewhere with only bad mobile connection for a few days.

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Amen to this. And give them a mobile cell plan with 1GB of data per month.

I've seen some web sites with 250MB payloads on the home page due to ads and pre-loading videos.

I work with parolees who get free government cell phones and then burn through the 3GB/mo of data within three days. Then they can't apply for jobs, get bus times, rent a bike, top up their subway card, get directions.

"But all the cheap front-end talent is in thick client frameworks, telemetry indicates most revenue conversions are from users on 5G, our MVP works for 80% of our target user base, and all we need to do is make back our VC's investment plus enough to cash out on our IPO exit strategy, plus other reasons not to care" — self-identified serial entrepreneur, probably

Having an adblocker (firefox mobile works with uBlock origin) and completely deactivate loading of images and videos can get you quite far with limited connection.

You're 100% right. uBlock Origin can reduce page weight by an astronomical amount.

uMatrix (unsupported but still works) reduces page weight and compute even more

How so?

it allows javascript on the original site domain, but turns it off for external domains, buts then lets you selectively turn it back on, and remembers what you've selected. Turning off javascript turns off a lot of both addtional downloading and cpu cycles. for impatient people it's tedious, but for minimalists it's heaven.

If you enable the Advanced Features mode of Ublock Origin you get access to just about all the things uMatrix does

Except for a usable UI.

And disabling JavaScript

I strongly suspect that the venn diagram of people that know how to minimize data usage, and indigent people being given free cell phones with limited data has precious little overlap.

Yes, but "qingcharles" said he works with them, so he can show it to them.

Yeah and then give them thousands upon thousands of paying customers with these constraints worth caring about

This is probably a deliberate decision on the part of the government. A lot of the justice system is designed to keep people in prison.

That makes little sense. If it was a deliberate plan, it would be much more effective (and cheaper) to not provide the cellphones and data plan in the first place.

You see this all the time. Need to keep up appearances but the actually implementation is poor.

Exactly. It's easy to attribute malice where incompetence is the answer. The root problem is that there is no feedback loop so that the government agency funding the program isn't properly looking at the product being delivered at the other end and putting measures in place to stop the contractors from taking advantage of the program to only deliver the barest minimum without tracking the effects on the end customer.

It's not deliberate by the government. And the situation is getting better. Basically some of the telcos being a bit greedy and only giving 3GB/mo data to the users and spending all their profits on paying people in the hoods $20 a pop to sign people up.

Recently I've started to see some contracts with vastly more data, including some unlimiteds.

Just put them on a train during work hours! We have really good coverage here but there's congestion and frequent random dropouts, and a lot of apps just don't plan for that at all.

There's no need for retreat. Chrome DevTools have "simulate slow connection" button.

Yeah - and do they use it? Does it help experiencing them the joy of wanting just a little text information, but having to load loads of other stuff first and your connection timing out? I am afraid to get the full experience, they actually need to have a bad connection.

My first education was in industrial design, there designers usually have pride in avoiding needless complexity and material waste.

Even if I do web services I try to do so with as little moving parts as needed and with huge reliance on trusted and standardized solutions. If see any addition of complexity as a cost that needs to be weighed against the benefits you hope it brings you will automatically end up with a lean and fast application.

A little time with embedded hardware will teach you a few things too.

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