Technology

Ad blockers don't protect you against dumbass frontend devs who serve 5mb png files to be stuffed into 600x400 boxes.

Raymond Hill is a hero of our times. Not even kidding.

it has stupid things like weekdays sorted alphabetically

Holy shit, that's stupid. Why would you even do this in the first place?! I can't comprehend how anyone could come to the conclusion that that's a good way to sort it.

Friday Monday Saturday Sunday Thursday Tuesday Wednesday

In its defense, that also flows better if you're trying to sing it.

At my current dev role I try to do optimizations to make new system area pages pretty lightweight, but it's a bit of a struggle as I'm working with devs who have been in the same role for decades. WCAG is not prioritized, and they pull in a ton of JS libraries that usually aren't even used. A lot of the practices I see in use are from 10 years ago, but slowly tidying up the horror show with each dev product meeting.

Admittedly could be much worse though, at least our pages aren't 21MB large.

I'm all for reducing the size of webpages with garbage bloat but a little CSS for readability on this site would have gone a long way.

Ps. thanks for sauce

The appendices of that post could use a rewrite. They read weird:

An example we've discussed before, is at a well-known, prestigious, startup that has a very left-leaning employee base, where everyone got rich, on a discussion about the covid stimulus checks, in a slack discussion, a well meaning progressive employee said that it was pointless because people would just use their stimulus checks to buy stock.

A lot of devs I know are purely ticket in ticket out… so unless someone convinced management there’s a performance problem and that they’d need to prioritize it over new features (good luck), then it will not be done.

Not to suggest you don't deserve to be paid more, but it feels like the issue would more be that the people paying for the site aren't instructing the people that develop it to make these accommodations.

Because I know plenty of devs that just straight up don't give a shit about accommodating low-end devices, regardless of what they're paid. It's like a point of pride almost.

Hell, that's the energy of the DontKillMyApp people: they just straight up think their app should use as many resources as it likes as long as it likes, and they shouldn't have to be considerate in development. Strain on device be damned.

I've seen some that straight up admit they don't even think the user should be able to kill an app process.

I've been working at organizing a bunch of stuff I've been collecting over the years .... data, writing, lists, ideas, whatever ..... I kept using all sorts of services, apps, websites, cloud services and all sorts of crap to maintain them all but eventually it all becomes too complicated and breaks down.

I've since discovered just using simple text files and services that just use simple text mark down ... no special service, nothing proprietary, easily transferable and interoperable.

I started looking at websites the same way ..... I don't care what it looks like, I just want to read the information ..... you made it too hard for me to read your simple text info? You're asking me to turn off my ad blockers and turn on Java script? All to read 200 words on your site? I'll skip it and move on to the next site that will allow me.

I'm a web dev and yes they could. It's annoying that web devs get blamed for it though, the reason for all the javascript is mostly business decisions out of our control.

Mainly the tracking scripts which the marketing department adds against out will. But also it's a lot cheaper to have a client-rendered web app than a traditional website (with client side rendering you can shut off all your web servers and just keep the api servers, our server side processing went down 90% in the switchover). And it's more efficient for the company to have one team working in one programming language and one framework that can run the backend and frontend, so the frontend ends being a web app even if it's not really necessary.

REACT EVERYTHING

Sorry, not everyone speaks rich and not everyone speaks poor

I only ever used the lite version of FB Messenger. Shit was much better than the full version, especially without all the bloated "features" that I didn't use at best and being annoying/battery drains at worst. Was noticeably snappier on both my old and new phones. Fortunately most of my friends started using Discord and/or Signal with better features (and one less Meta app to have running).

I think that the idea of having smaller and less demanding versions of lots of apps is a good idea. As so many apps are just not optimized and bloated. Just being coded to rely on higher specs to make up for said lack of effort in cleaning up stuff. The ads on ads on ads being part of the issue as well. Which is only getting worse with the close buttons not loading unless shit has been however many seconds. Seems that the "hit box" for the close buttons is getting smaller and smaller to guaranty the ads are clicked on and then open another app or a browser. Though optimizations and better coding won't fix dirty underhanded grifts.

Haven't done this type of optimizing in a long time, I had a quick look at the network graph for your front page (F12 dev tools in desktop browser), my understanding is it looks like you are getting blocked from loading additional resources (fonts + background) until your style sheets are fully read --pink line is document loaded i believe.

It may be worthwhile to experiment with adding some preload links to the html template? or output? like below and assessing if it makes things faster for you.

<link rel="preload" as="image" href="https://volcanolair.co/img/bg1-ultracompressed.webp" fetchpriority="high">

<link rel="preload" as="font" href="https://volcanolair.co/fonts/Inter-Regular.woff2">

<link rel="preload" as="font" href="https://volcanolair.co/fonts/Inter-Bold.woff2">

___

Honestly, 4 seconds is really slow, especially with static HTML. I built my first companies' site myself, it includes a video on the front page and jquery, is built by PHP, and on descent Internet connections the front page will load in slightly over a second, other pages dip under that.

There are loads of tweaks you can make to -any- site, and total amount of bytes really isn't the only speed factor here.

I love all your replies.

You wouldn’t get these responses from stackoverflow.

This isn’t even a programming or development community…it’s a general interest one.

You didn’t even ask for help.

Not that you'd want to because you hate JS and web components and all that, and there's nothing wrong with your website, but NextJS supports Static Site generation.

So, JS and frameworks and webcomponents can get the job done for simple stuff nowadays. My portfolio page has a load time of 631 ms using the SSG built into NextJS, and its really similar to your website.