I have been thinking a lot about performance recently as I redesign my website. Given the majority of us have what seems like a mini supercomputer (in comparison to 10 years ago) with us at all times, it is easy to forget about performance as a feature.
I was recently reading Niki’s great post on JavaScript Bloat in 2024, and it prompted me to look at my own website to see how it stacks up.
The front page of my website currently comes to 1.14 MB with JavaScript taking up 468 KB of that. Now I do have compression on so only 321 KB is downloaded, but I am sure I can do a lot better with my new website. The majority of the problem is due to using Gatsby and React.
React is quite frankly overkill for a static site, but I used it because I wanted to learn the technology. My new site is being built with eleventy (11ty) with a few nunjucks templates and no React or CSS frameworks in sight. The plan is to join the 512KB Club and try and get my website to below 100 KB.
Again you might be wondering why bother with all this effort when the majority of people have Superfast broadband or 4G/5G anyway?
The fact is a lot of people don’t have superfast internet all the time. I know personally when I am sitting in the car waiting to pick up my children from school, I reach for my phone to kill some time. Unfortunately not living in a big city means there are a few dead spots when it comes to mobile internet. When my phone says I only have 3G or one bar of 4G I might as well not bother.
In Firefox or Chrome you can throttle your network connection to simulate various connection types. On “Regular 3G” my website takes 10 seconds to load. Which isn’t terrible, and it is at least usable.
Compare that to a site like LinkedIn that needs over 6 MB compressed, and 35 MB uncompressed to work and takes over a minute to load on a “Regular 3G” connection, and you can see why I give up without a full 4G connection.
This isn’t just a problem with the web but with desktop and mobile applications too.
The M2 Pro in my Mac is at least 30 times faster than the Pentium 4 I used to have in my computer back in 2005. However, I wouldn’t say everything loads 30 times faster.
A lot of this is to do with software bloat, as computers have got faster developers have got lazy when it comes to performance in applications. Of course when it comes to shipping software with tight deadlines, fast enough is usually OK.
When it comes to my own software where I don’t have any deadlines I want it to be as performant as possible. At the end of the day, a static website should load instantly on a modern computer with a fast connection.
❤️ Picks of the Week
📝 Article - A retrospective on a year without streaming music - I recently dropped Spotify in favour of Apple Music, mainly because it is bundled as part of Apple One, but I like the fact they pay artists more than Spotify (especially now). The problem is it is still peanuts compared to CD sales. 1 CD sale is equivalent to 3,000 streams of a song. Even with my favourite artists I am not sure if I have listened to their songs that much. I miss buying CDs, and it is interesting to see how others are coping without streaming.
🎧 Song - MIT License text becomes viral “sad girl” piano ballad generated by AI - Because why not! There are quite a few of these AI songs that are coming out. If you haven’t heard it yet, What Red Hot Chili Peppers sound like to people who don’t like Red Hot Chili Peppers is great too.
📝 Article - Exactly what to say in code reviews - Code reviews can be tricky. On one hand you want to encourage developers to write better code but on the other you don’t want to come across as nitpicking. This has some good tips for how to phrase your code reviews.
📝 Article - What I think about when I edit - I am not very good at editing my writing, I am sorry for that. I write it once, give it a read over to correct any spelling or grammatical mistakes and then send it. This is definitely an article I will be coming back to.
💬 Quote of the Week
The hustle and the daily grind can wear you down. Fuck the hustle. Find those things that promote the proper growth and expansion of your life and work. Slow down, read, study, replenish your soul, and sharpen the ax.
From Feck Perfuction by James Victore.