> But it does always cost you something. Developer time isn't free, after all.
According to the rest of the comment we seem to largely agree. But this statement is what I want to challenge a bit.
Basically it comes down to this: We're doing plenty of unnecessary stuff all the time, especially in business IT (web applications, CRUD, CRM, CMS, reporting etc.) software.
Your Electron example points to the right direction, but there are also a lot of practices regarding code organization (patterns, paradigms), being too liberal with pulling down dependencies, framework bloat etc.
Simply getting rid of things that we don't need and thinking about performance in very rough terms gets us _both_ better performance and minimal code. I would wager that this isn't a tradeoff as in you describe. We might, especially in the mid-long term, actually gain developer time.
This often means thinking about DB access patterns, indexing and so on as you mentioned. Meaning we think in SQL and lean on the capabilities and heuristics of our DB. What does the DB actually need to do when I do these queries? How can I model the data in a way that gives me just enough flexibility with reasonable performance? Which parts of the system needs to know what? How does the data need to flow through it?
All that stuff we sometimes put on top (ORMs, OO patterns etc.) can get in the way of that. Does it really make us more productive to put these abstractions on top? Do we gain anything from doing these OO incantations?
The article in question is a really good example of removing complexity and drastically increasing performance at the same time.
I have a good example as well.
Our internal image optimization module that we use to generate differently sized images and formats in order to accommodate browser capabilities and screen sizes, was getting noticeably slow, especially for e-commerce related sites and brochures that typically feature a gallery per product/service.
Long story short: It got 50-60x faster simply by removing a convenience layer, writing SQL directly, processing the images in grouped batches and so on. AKA all just low hanging fruit. The end result is also simpler. It took work/time but it didn't need to be that slow in the first place.
And we are our own users too! We have to maintain, extend, test our code. Faster code gives us faster iteration cycles. Fast feedback loops lead to much higher productivity and flow.
According to the rest of the comment we seem to largely agree. But this statement is what I want to challenge a bit.
Basically it comes down to this: We're doing plenty of unnecessary stuff all the time, especially in business IT (web applications, CRUD, CRM, CMS, reporting etc.) software.
Your Electron example points to the right direction, but there are also a lot of practices regarding code organization (patterns, paradigms), being too liberal with pulling down dependencies, framework bloat etc.
Simply getting rid of things that we don't need and thinking about performance in very rough terms gets us _both_ better performance and minimal code. I would wager that this isn't a tradeoff as in you describe. We might, especially in the mid-long term, actually gain developer time.
This often means thinking about DB access patterns, indexing and so on as you mentioned. Meaning we think in SQL and lean on the capabilities and heuristics of our DB. What does the DB actually need to do when I do these queries? How can I model the data in a way that gives me just enough flexibility with reasonable performance? Which parts of the system needs to know what? How does the data need to flow through it?
All that stuff we sometimes put on top (ORMs, OO patterns etc.) can get in the way of that. Does it really make us more productive to put these abstractions on top? Do we gain anything from doing these OO incantations?
The article in question is a really good example of removing complexity and drastically increasing performance at the same time.
I have a good example as well.
Our internal image optimization module that we use to generate differently sized images and formats in order to accommodate browser capabilities and screen sizes, was getting noticeably slow, especially for e-commerce related sites and brochures that typically feature a gallery per product/service.
Long story short: It got 50-60x faster simply by removing a convenience layer, writing SQL directly, processing the images in grouped batches and so on. AKA all just low hanging fruit. The end result is also simpler. It took work/time but it didn't need to be that slow in the first place.
And we are our own users too! We have to maintain, extend, test our code. Faster code gives us faster iteration cycles. Fast feedback loops lead to much higher productivity and flow.