> You’d realise how bad this is when I tell you the benchmarks for the native WhatsApp for comparison. I tested the old/native WhatsApp, and it uses just 190MB most of the time, dropping to less than 100MB when it’s completely idle. At worst, it would reach 300MB, which can happen only when the chat is really active.
Well sounds like a lot of useless work was being done then, how does it gobble 100MB when idle? Are the protocols that complex?
Just do as I do and open web.whatsapp.com in your favorite browser
> In the very worst case they used next.js to write a second backend that sat between my existing Django backend (which had been done earlier) and the front end.
That's hilarious.
Casey Muratori truly is right when he says to "non-pessimize" software (= make it do what it should do and not more), before optimizing it.
> React and React-like frameworks (includes Vue and Svelte I believe)
Putting React with those two is a wild take.
> 99% percent of websites would work a lot better with SSR and a few lines of JavaScript here and there and there is zero reason to bring anything like React to the table.
Probably but as soon as you have a modicum of logic in your page the primitives of the web are a pain to use.
Also, I must be able to build stuff in the 1% space. I actually did it before: I built an app that's entirely client-side, with Vue, and "serverless" in the sense that it's distributed in the form of one single HTML file. Although we changed that in the last few months to host it on a proper server.
The level of psychological trauma that some back-end devs seem to endure is hilarious though. Like I get it, software sucks and it's sad but no need to be dramatic about it.
And btw, re forbidding stuff: no library, no process, no method can ever substitute to actually knowing what you're doing.
But I think there is a reason for the existence of "clean code" practices: it makes devs easier to replace. Plus it may create a market to try to optimize intrinsically slow programs!
I feel like AI has dramatically changed how complete rewrites can be considered, especially for long-lived, legacy projects.