alt Hacker NewsFast Software, the Best Software (2019)
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Yes, there are so many examples of this .. a recent one for me, is iStatMenu .. it just got to the point that waiting for it to start, alone, was sufficiently boring enough that I sought an alternative .. and of course, I realized, there's no reason not to use the Linux tooling I'm accustomed to, and so I have btop where iStatMenu used to live, kinda. btop doesn't get in the way, doesn't phone home, doesn't check a registration key, isn't harvesting key clicks, and .. so on .. its just small, light, and fast.
Well, with the encumbrance of it living in a terminal window, but I also live in the terminal window even on MacOS, so its a feature not a bug.
Point is, I wouldn't have this to say about it if iStatMenu had just been a little more discrete about its loading times ..
> Google Maps has gotten so slow
When it comes to navigating (except public transit), hiking, and route building, Organic Maps[1] is very good. OSM data and offline-first is the way forward for detailed and _fast_ map experience.
For cycling route building I have to mention BRouter[2], which allows you to write a custom cost function that is used to tweak your route preferences.
The neglected part here is latency, speed itself can be masked by progress bars/animations, but having visible lag ruins the idea of speed and users treat it as slow vs animated loading bar.
I run headless Alpine Linux (a minimal distro) in my homelab and it’s fast AF. The lag in Windows Explorer is sad when something like cd folder/folder is instant in Linux.
Shout-out to PowerSync for making it easier to develop fast offline-first mobile apps. It pushes data from Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server subscriptions to a SQLite into the user's mobile device, avoiding the need for many loading animations when the data is there ahead of time. My company is a customer and we recommend it.
Also called: "Death by PM"
Esp. known from Microsoft, Adobe, Google. Should be added to the Antipatterns repo
If the software is fast as a byproduct of being simple, that tends to align with correctness.
If it is fast because it is optimized, then that does not align with correctness, because optimizing something that works only adds risk.
I fully agree. I loathe slow software. I hate bloat. I love fast software. As a developer, I'm completely, even irrationally, obsessed with speed, performance optimization, and profiling. I wish more developers felt the same way.
I think it's the different feeling you get from using an end-to-end streaming service (compute, not videos) versus the one that does a lot of intermittent buffering. It's quite subtle actually. Using a vanilla language model can feel like that if it's also sufficiently small but they are going towards the opposite direction very rapidly now because cloud.
Shout-out: Voidtools Everything on windows. Lightning fast file search.
I will read this entire article tomorrow while I wait for the Cursor UI and Visual Studio to finish loading.
No, no software is the best software.
BTW, the title should say "(2019)".
Fast and efficient software varies depending on the local context, but for me, I think I'd be fine with something slower as long as it's convenient enough. After all, once it passes a certain threshold, I can barely even notice the speed difference anyway.
I wonder what OP's thinks of IDEs like VSCode. Would they see it as heavy and not great because it's Electron-based? But I find IDEs convenient.
Remove the specter and friends mitigations from your linux kernel, and your system will be significantly faster.
Honestly, I'm in partially disagree camp. What matters is how much time it saves.
A good WYSIWYG editor will run circles around the fastest text editor. Even if WYSIWYG is a bit slower to open.
It would be preferable for software to be more focused and faster over time, but that doesn't attract people to it.
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On this note, (from a web dev perspective) I think we've overdone making the static build as lean as possible and pushing everything into the backend. E.g., if a 2MB dataset will make a search/select bar return results instantly instead of having to roundtrip an API, just send up the whole dataset with your initial load. After gzip it's nowhere close to 2MB anyway.
Also, I think suspense is an anti-pattern now. We've all been conditioned to groan every time we see suspense animations because it means the website must be slow. It's better to just have a little circling loader or just freeze.