I worked at a firm who’s stated goal was for all the street to have the Terminal on one monitor and our product on the other. Our application was sophisticated and advanced, but it was a web app. The Bloomberg didn’t really do what the app did, but it felt so much better. Responsive, native, dense, and has keybindings. Using the Terminal makes you feel powerful and in control: it is extension of yourself.
Our app on the other hand looked and felt like all the other “modern” web apps: low information density, slow, no keybindings, and frustrating. Also it logged you out every 30 minutes! It was a total joke and we had a hard time getting people to use the product.
I think companies make the mistake on just focusing on features, especially with web apps. Performance is absolutely critical and the #1 prerequisite for a good product. But despite research and studies on how users care about performance a lot, developers don’t seem to. Every repeats mantras like “programmer time is more important”, “... the root of all evil”, “just wait a year or two and your app will be 2x faster!”, etc etc.
With the end of exponentially increasing single threaded performance, I think developers are recently starting to realize how valuable performance is. Hopefully this trend continues and we software engineers start making software we are actually proud of.
The current state of development and developers is inexcusable and sad. The slow crap we make is honestly sickening.
Our app on the other hand looked and felt like all the other “modern” web apps: low information density, slow, no keybindings, and frustrating. Also it logged you out every 30 minutes! It was a total joke and we had a hard time getting people to use the product.
I think companies make the mistake on just focusing on features, especially with web apps. Performance is absolutely critical and the #1 prerequisite for a good product. But despite research and studies on how users care about performance a lot, developers don’t seem to. Every repeats mantras like “programmer time is more important”, “... the root of all evil”, “just wait a year or two and your app will be 2x faster!”, etc etc.
With the end of exponentially increasing single threaded performance, I think developers are recently starting to realize how valuable performance is. Hopefully this trend continues and we software engineers start making software we are actually proud of.
The current state of development and developers is inexcusable and sad. The slow crap we make is honestly sickening.