Comment by cosmic_cheese
1 day ago
This the natural consequence of a platform having high capability but low barrier to entry. Conscientious use of resources cannot be assumed and is in fact the exception rather than the rule, and so guardrails must be put in place.
This is an enormous problem with software in general. IMO it's probably because software has been abstracted into the stratosphere to the point that most developers aren't at all aware of resources or even the machine it's running on. That's someone else's problem. I really hate it.
While the problem is very real, I don't think it's the fault of abstractions or even developers. If you have to fight your product manager for the authorization to spend a little time using resources correctly, it is probably because there's no organization-wide incentive to reduce resource usage of a web application, unless you're called Apple, Google or Mozilla.
It’s a mix, probably. In some cases it’s organizational, it there’s absolutely also devs who take a cavalier attitude towards optimization.
What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
Of which, the biggest example is shipping Chrome with the application.
Whenever I refactor and endpoint that takes the p99 from 1 minute to 1 second, I think about how a 4k video being uploaded undoes all of that progress