alt Hacker NewsI would love to understand these people, really!
On a personal level, if thing works - I say, cool, lets focus on something else now.
But I have worked with people who are similar to the author and we will get into the conversation:
- they: wait, but the bundle size is 2.4Mb, it can be improved a lot
- me: by how much? and we have 10k users/day and we have cache policy setup
- they: we can reduce it to 1Mb, imagine saving 10k*1.4Mb every day
- me: yeah, but its not costing us much, if you focus on making it perfect your salary will cost us 2 years of outbound traffic cost.
- they: no, but its not perfect
How do I get there? What are the resources I can read and learn from to look at things to make them perfect?
Replies
bontaq • today at 4:51 PM
Starting from a literal bandwidth costs perspective definitely won't get you there. I'd start by trying to feel personally annoyed by things like that. Then maybe try to feel more annoyed, since you know it'll touch every customer forever.
In that bandwidth case I'd be annoyed by the waste which kind of pervades software already, and it'd feel great to know at least we countered it a little bit.
Broken windows theory
The issue with “premature optimization is bad” is that some see it as a permission to not optimize at all. Hence you eventually end up with a system where everything is bad.
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Although for some of us being obsessive-compulsive weirdos this is the only way of life: an itch that keeps on physically scratching until resolved.
“Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think ‘well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that?’ But, what’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right […] it’s a beautiful thing to do something right.”