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Comment by rpastuszak | Hacker News Reader

I lived in Shoreditch for 7 years and most of my flats had almost 3G internet speeds. The last one had windows that incidentally acted like a faraday cage.

I always test my projects with throttled bandwidth, largely because (just like with a11y) following good practices results in better UX for all users, not just those with poor connectivity.

Edit: Another often missed opportunity is building SPAs as offline-first.

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>> Another often missed opportunity is building SPAs as offline-first.

You are going to get so many blank stares at many shops building web apps when suggesting things like this. This kind of consideration doesn't even enter into the minds of many developers in 2024. Few of the available resources in 2024 address it that well for developers coming up in the industry.

Back in the early-2000s, I recall these kinds of things being an active discussion point even with work placement students. Now that focus seems to have shifted to developer experience with less consideration on the user. Should developer experience ever weigh higher than user experience?

>Should developer experience ever weigh higher than user experience?

Developer experience is user experience. However, in a normative sense, I operate such that Developer suffering is preferable to user suffering to get any arbitrary task done.

The irony for me is that I got into React because I thought that we could finally move to an offline-first SPA application. Current trends seem to go the opposite.

SPAs and "engineering for slow internet" usually don't belong together. The giant bundles usually guarantee slow first paint, and the incremental rendering/loading usually guarantees a lot of network chatter that randomly breaks the page when one of the requests times out. Most web applications are fundamentally online. For these, consider what inspires more confidence when you're in a train on a hotspot: an old school HTML forms page (like HN), or a page with a lot of React grey placeholders and loading spinners scattered throughout? I guess my point is that while you can take a lot of careful time and work to make an SPA work offline-first, as a pattern it tends to encourage the bloat and flakiness that makes things bad on slow internet.

London internet (and English internet in general) is just so bad.

Having lived in lots of countries (mainly developing) it’s embarrassing how bad our internet is in comparison

Oh, London is notorious for having... questionable internet speeds in certain areas. It's good if you live in a new build flat/work in a recently constructed office building or you own your own home in a place OpenReach have gotten to yet, but if you live in an apartment building/work in an office building more than 5 or so years old?

Yeah, there's a decent chance you'll be stuck with crappy internet as a result. I still remember quite a few of my employers getting frustrated that fibre internet wasn't available for the building they were renting office space in, despite them running a tech company that really needed a good internet connection.

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