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Discussion on: One Cool Trick to Speed Up Your Website Performance (Not Really)

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Jamund Ferguson

This is an epic rant and I respect that. I do want to share one anecdote that pushes back against your general sentiment, just a little. After working on the react-based add product page for a year or so and making a bunch of performance improvements I got invited to help out on another page that was primarily server rendered and used jquery for the interactivity. You know what? It was a really slow and there were almost no easy wins. What there were instead was a bunch of poor architecture choices that needed refactoring with not enough time to do it. Old school problems like not using document fragments when appending in a loop kept popping up. You don't see that anymore when using tools like react, because they manage a lot of low-level optimizations for you. I agree the modern web eco-system makes it way too easy to pull in massive dependencies that are potentially both insecure and slow. But the flip side is often dealing with a make shift framework written by burnt out co-workers long ago who put far less thought into it than even the web framework ™️ snake oil salesman of today. Pick your poison. Do you want the one found at the supermarket in the shiny bottle or some home-brewed moonshine? They'll both kill you at the end of the day.