From embarrassing 30s to consistent 90s on Lighthouse - this is the story of performance optimization gone wrong, then right. What started as a typical modern web stack became a journey of unlearning, where an accidental JavaScript-free deploy revealed that sometimes less is more.
Interesting article and approach. While I absolutely agree it’s too easy to bloat with unneeded complexity on the off chance you might want it… I’m suspect of how his app was built. These frameworks and tools wouldn’t be widely used if they were shit.
Having worked with a lot of these tools and frameworks extensively I really do think they are shit for most use cases. I also find that software industry love doing cargo culting where people just use whatever tools big companies like Google or Meta put out without actually considering whether these tools are useful in their specific circumstance. The big companies also encourage this because they effectively get to outsource training on their internal tools to other companies, and then poach top talent that’s already familiar with their stack. The way he structured the app is perfectly reasonable. Treating the UI simply as a presentation layer removes a ton of complexity from the architecture.
Interesting article and approach. While I absolutely agree it’s too easy to bloat with unneeded complexity on the off chance you might want it… I’m suspect of how his app was built. These frameworks and tools wouldn’t be widely used if they were shit.
But in general, good lesson in “less is more”.
Having worked with a lot of these tools and frameworks extensively I really do think they are shit for most use cases. I also find that software industry love doing cargo culting where people just use whatever tools big companies like Google or Meta put out without actually considering whether these tools are useful in their specific circumstance. The big companies also encourage this because they effectively get to outsource training on their internal tools to other companies, and then poach top talent that’s already familiar with their stack. The way he structured the app is perfectly reasonable. Treating the UI simply as a presentation layer removes a ton of complexity from the architecture.