> And no, the problem is not "Rails"
The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs on any machine before they made the move.
The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs on any machine before they made the move.
Their "solution" was to enable SSR for us ranters' accounts.
The fact that they have this ability / awareness and haven't completely reverted by now is shocking to me.
Which, unfortunately, cannot be measured :( so no KPIs. Darn!
Its all fun and games until you cut quality over and over so much your customers just leave. Ask Chrysler or GE. I mean they must have saved, what, billions across decades? And for free!
Well... um... not free actually, because those companies have been run into the ground, dragged through hell, revived, and then damned again.
Maybe it will make a significant enough cumulative impact 5 years later that it can actuallly be noticed and defended in a meeting against other priorities.
But I’ve never heard of anyone hiring someone on minimum wage and deferring a huge bonus to 5 years later.
Even if it does makes a big impact, would anyone even take a such a job?
> Which, unfortunately, cannot be measured
I know everyone knows the cliche "The devil is in the details" but everyone seems to continually make these mistakes because nuance is hard. But then again what is a cliche if not words of wisdom that everyone can recite but fail to follow?
> Its all fun and games until you cut quality over and over so much your customers just leave.
[0] You infer where the downed planes were shot through the measures you can make on recovered planes. But that is very different than measuring where downed planes were shot. You can't just take the inverse of the returned planes and know where to add plating from there.
if they were forced to use slow machines, they would not be able to put out crap like that
Now you CAN so it so that is not the case, but tbh i have never seen that in the wild -
Edit: here's a good investigation on a real-enough app https://www.developerway.com/posts/tailwind-vs-linaria-perfo...
Tailwind is probably one of the best considering you can use Vite to literally strip out all unused css easily.
And I think tailwind v4 does this automatically
This is such a tired trope.
The reality is both can be slow, it depends on your data access patterns, network usage, and architecture.
But the other reality is that SPAs and REST APIs just usually have less optimal network usage and much worse data access patterns than traditional DB connected SSR monoliths. Same goes for micro service.
Like, you could design a highly scalable and optimal SPA. Who's doing it? Almost nobody.
No, instead they're making basically one endpoint per DB table, recreating SQL queries in client side memory, duplicating complex business logic on the front and back end, and sending 50 requests to load an dashboard.
Even other frameworks like Vue.js, Solid or Svelte don't really suffer from it as much. It simply happens a couple order of magnitudes more often in React than any other framework.
GitHub is big software, but not that big. Huge monorepos and big big diffs grind GitHub to a pulp.
> if they were forced to use slow machines, they would not be able to put out crap like that
Lots of developers are rather obsessed with writing good, performant code. The problem is rather that many project managers do not let them do these insane optimizations because they take time.
The only things that forcing developers to use slow machines will bring is developers quitting (and quite a lot of them would actually love to see the person responsible for this decision dead (I'm not joking) because he made the developers' job a hell on earth).
What you should rather do if you want performant software is to fire all the project managers who don't give the developers the necessary time (or don't encourage the developers) to write highly optimized code (i.e. those idiot project managers who argue with "pragmatism" concerning this point).
No they don't. It's literally just a skill issue.
To give just one simple example: to get the textbook complexity bound for the Dijkstra algorithm, you need some fancy mergeable heap data structures which are much more complicated, and thus time-intense to implement than the naive implementation.
Or you can get insane low-level optimizations by using the SIMD instructions that modern processors provide. Unluckily, this takes a lot of time and leads to code that is not easy to understand (and thus not easy to write) for "classically trained" programmers.
Yes, you indeed need a lot of skills to write such very fast algorithms, but even for such ultra-smart programmers, finding and applying such optimizations need a lot of development time, which is why this is often only done for code parts that are insanely computation-intense and performance-critical such as video (and sometimes audio) codecs.
Which, it seems, was a result of the M$ acquisition: https://muan.co/posts/javascript
> Writing on the internet can be a two-way thing, a learning experience guided by iteration and feedback. I’ve learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and comments that were fun but would make articles less focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was.
https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news
Which is true. Pedantism is the lowest form of pseudo-intelligence.
You can’t just lay this bear trap of an opportunity and expect me to not pedantically state that the word is either “pedantry”, the activity performed by pedants, or “pedantic”, to describe such activities.
“Pedantism” would be a philosophy or viewpoint that extols pedantry. Pedantism would be to pedantry as deontology is to rule-following, a justification of an activity. As such, pedantism would be a slightly higher form of pseudo-intelligence than mere pedantry.
But only slightly.
> indenting or quoting yourself in a way that makes it look more authoritative
network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy = 1
A fun part of a retro at my company last year was me explaining to a team, “had all of your pods’ requests succeeded, the DB would have been pushing out well over 200 Gbps, which is generally reserved for top-of-rack switches.” Of course, someone else then had to translate that into “4K Blu-Rays per second,” because web devs aren’t typically familiar with networking, racks, data centers…
If github has a million users visiting it per day on a FRESH cache, and all of them have to download at least 10 megabytes of text data (both of these numbers are far too high), you are at ... 0.015 "4k blurays per second". Yeah I think MS's datacenters will survive.
Meanwhile, I opened a 100K line CSV in Neovim and while it took a couple of seconds to open and render highlighting, after that, it was fine.
There are of course performant react apps out there. What Steve did with tldraw is amazing.
However, the vast majority of the apps out there are garbage since the framework itself is terribly inefficient.
I’m not a frontend dev, and have next to zero experience with anything beyond jQuery, but an analogy is shell. Bash (and zsh, though I find some of its syntactic sugar nicer, albeit still inscrutable) will happily let you do extremely stupid things, but it also lets you do extremely complicated things in a very concise manner. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad, it means you need to know what the hell you’re doing, and use linters, write tests, etc.
Available data confirms that SPA tends to perform worse than classic SSR.
Github's code view page has been unreasonably slow for the last several years ever since they migrated away from Rails for no apparent reason.
I’m sure you could make something work better as a SPA, but nobody does.