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Your screen name forced me into a double take, as it's very rare for me to come across a similar name.

On topic, the idea of performance optimization seems to be completely lost in large sectors of modern day computer science. My recent experience being windows. I have several old laptops that had been rendered completely unusable through windows updates [one even stopped charging]. However, once replacing windows with Ubuntu, they 'feel' like some of the fastest machines I have. Hell, even the one that wouldn't charge, now charges and works like a charm.

It's sad to think of all the waste, physical, electrical, and economical, that stems from poorly optimized code.



When product managers come to me and demand I make the <select> look a certain way to fit in with the rest of the "design language", I end up having to re-write all of the base and edge cases and accessibility and theming of what's already a perfectly functioning UI component. That code gets shipped to every user. And that's just one component... tomorrow I will make the <input type="checkbox"> look a certain way. Probably hundreds of KB just building these base UI components to fit in with some "design goal" that will change again in 6 months. If it makes the app unusable for some (unmeasured) percentage of our users on featurephones in developing countries, they don't care, because the product managers making these decisions will be gone in 6 months too, replaced with another with the same attitudes. At least the app "looks nice"!




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