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Discussion on: Should Frontend Devs Care About Performance??

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darkwiiplayer profile image
𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Edited

One of the most essential skills related to performance is knowing when it matters.

50ms of expensive loop in a button press that will lead the user to a different view in your application? Probably not a big deal.

50ms of expensive loop in a paint worklet that will be used on several elements in your website? That is probably a huge problem.

Once you've figured where performance matters, there's many other things to worry about related to identifying performance problems and fixing them. Bot all of that is wasted time when we've failed to realise that the code we're working on doesn't need to be performant in the first place.


With that being said though: Front-end developers should probably care more about performance than back-end developers. These days adding a bit of processing power to your distributed back-end isn't all that expensive anymore, whereas losing paying users to a bad UX due to slow code quickly adds up.

What's more, processing power isn't distributed evenly throughout society, so there is serious risk of unintentionally preventing users who can't afford good-enough hardware from using a service.

And last but not least, wasted processing power does not care whether it happens in the browser or in the server. If anything, it might be more likely that big hosting companies are using green energy to improve their image, making the front end by far the worse place of the two to waste processing power.

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