Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
They really need to do something about performance if they want to entice developers there, nearly 4 second load time for your profile on a monster connection is just not going to work. (I then ran Page Speed Insights - yeah it isn't good and it will hurt your readership numbers).
Then there is accessibility - or lack of it.
Looks like they have the right idea - throw all their resources at marketing, something most devs forget about, but I think they have already made some pretty poor choices to try and get a MVP out the door that are going to hurt them when they try to scale and their seed funding will just go up in smoke.
And the final worrying thing - is this not built by the same guy who built Lystable (which seems to have changed name to Kalo and is now defunct as far as I can tell - or their whole site just happens to be down). Patterns like that are a red flag sometimes to be aware of.
I could be (and hope) I am wrong as I am not overly familiar with Kalo and Lystable and if someone has some better info that would be great as in principle I like the idea behind polywork, just cautious where I invest my time I suppose!
At the end of the day though, great article and thank you for introducing me to polywork - I will watch on and hope it becomes what it claims to be and people can point at this comment and laugh at me in the future! ❤🦄
While that is large improvement 350ms would not meet my technical standard. On my apps 200m is the highest load times with average of 100ms
I noticed they are using Ruby on Rails and Heroku. So likely it is backed by Postgres, and not a graphing database (which is what they should be using for a social network).
I think they are using turbo, so that means Rails is doing the rendering.
Heroku is terrible for scaling and gets expensive really fast. I'd hope to see them migrate to AWS but they might not have the cloud knowledge in house to make the leap.
This reminds me of DEV where they too were once on Heroku and so they ended up relying too much on third-party services which lead to a long development cycle and and maybe why we see such neglect of their community building which used to be the strongest aspect of DEV.
Polywork is bringing lots of people in the door, but there is not much to do the platform, and I think they should have had a community engagement plan in place.
Complaints aside I think they're doing well, we'll just have to see long term how it plays out.
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
Their Time To First Byte is now between 0.7 and 1.6 seconds on your profile. Which is a bit better than it was but not sure where they get 350ms from? (I am on the web version)
A really good analysis of some of the backend pain points and decisions that will hurt them! Lets hope they have a plan to get around those!
Front end wise (not going to do such a great deep dig as you did here, just the easy win!) the 2*mb* (and that is Gzipped - 6.8mb total!) of font awesome JS is one quick win they could improve on 😋🤣
It will be interesting to see when they start trying to get pages to rank!
I will watch on in interest, I hope you do a follow up in a couple of months on whether you get any engagement etc.
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They really need to do something about performance if they want to entice developers there, nearly 4 second load time for your profile on a monster connection is just not going to work. (I then ran Page Speed Insights - yeah it isn't good and it will hurt your readership numbers).
Then there is accessibility - or lack of it.
Looks like they have the right idea - throw all their resources at marketing, something most devs forget about, but I think they have already made some pretty poor choices to try and get a MVP out the door that are going to hurt them when they try to scale and their seed funding will just go up in smoke.
And the final worrying thing - is this not built by the same guy who built Lystable (which seems to have changed name to Kalo and is now defunct as far as I can tell - or their whole site just happens to be down). Patterns like that are a red flag sometimes to be aware of.
I could be (and hope) I am wrong as I am not overly familiar with Kalo and Lystable and if someone has some better info that would be great as in principle I like the idea behind polywork, just cautious where I invest my time I suppose!
At the end of the day though, great article and thank you for introducing me to polywork - I will watch on and hope it becomes what it claims to be and people can point at this comment and laugh at me in the future! ❤🦄
Profiles were really slow but they fixed it the other day bringing the load times from 1420ms to 350ms
twitter.com/PolyworkHQ/status/1407...
While that is large improvement 350ms would not meet my technical standard. On my apps 200m is the highest load times with average of 100ms
I noticed they are using Ruby on Rails and Heroku. So likely it is backed by Postgres, and not a graphing database (which is what they should be using for a social network).
I think they are using turbo, so that means Rails is doing the rendering.
Heroku is terrible for scaling and gets expensive really fast. I'd hope to see them migrate to AWS but they might not have the cloud knowledge in house to make the leap.
This reminds me of DEV where they too were once on Heroku and so they ended up relying too much on third-party services which lead to a long development cycle and and maybe why we see such neglect of their community building which used to be the strongest aspect of DEV.
Polywork is bringing lots of people in the door, but there is not much to do the platform, and I think they should have had a community engagement plan in place.
Complaints aside I think they're doing well, we'll just have to see long term how it plays out.
Their Time To First Byte is now between 0.7 and 1.6 seconds on your profile. Which is a bit better than it was but not sure where they get 350ms from? (I am on the web version)
A really good analysis of some of the backend pain points and decisions that will hurt them! Lets hope they have a plan to get around those!
Front end wise (not going to do such a great deep dig as you did here, just the easy win!) the 2*mb* (and that is Gzipped - 6.8mb total!) of font awesome JS is one quick win they could improve on 😋🤣
It will be interesting to see when they start trying to get pages to rank!
I will watch on in interest, I hope you do a follow up in a couple of months on whether you get any engagement etc.