Full stack developer & undergrad student of Mathematics; very passionate about both. Enthusiastic about learning, teaching, writing, open source, linguistics and more.
I feel that generally, many developers approach web development with the mindset of developing algorithms, and it's critical to understand that coding in different environments and/or for different purposes means that your top priorities as a developer should also be different.
It's similar, in a sense, to different types of writing - when writing a technical document, for example, you put your focus on completely different qualities than when writing a novel or a poem, even though they're both essentially writing!
As you've said, and it can't be stressed enough - in the case of web development the big-O efficiency of your code is usually a secondary priority. It's important to keep an eye out for it, but unless we're talking about really bad code, it typically makes no noticeable difference. Code brevity, maintainability and other similar qualities have a far greater impact on your product.
However, there is a nuance I'd like to shed light on - big-O time (and memory) efficiency are the two most popular aspects of efficiency, but they're by no means the only aspects of efficiency. Us web developers can afford to pay less attention to those, but other types of inefficiency can make a huge difference: concurrency & async operations, for example, are cardinal to virtually any modern app, and bad performance in that aspect could lead to terrible results. A similar point goes for network operations, bundle sizes, and more.
Once again, in most cases writing clear and maintainable code is a top priority, and can be achieved without sacrificing any of those, but it's important to keep in mind that inefficiency in those aspects of your logic could significantly harm the overall result.
TOTALLY agree. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone stresses over tiny details of algorithmic "performance", but when you open the inspector, you can see that their app is making three identical GET calls to the exact same endpoint to retrieve the exact same data.
Full stack developer & undergrad student of Mathematics; very passionate about both. Enthusiastic about learning, teaching, writing, open source, linguistics and more.
Great article!
I feel that generally, many developers approach web development with the mindset of developing algorithms, and it's critical to understand that coding in different environments and/or for different purposes means that your top priorities as a developer should also be different.
It's similar, in a sense, to different types of writing - when writing a technical document, for example, you put your focus on completely different qualities than when writing a novel or a poem, even though they're both essentially writing!
As you've said, and it can't be stressed enough - in the case of web development the big-O efficiency of your code is usually a secondary priority. It's important to keep an eye out for it, but unless we're talking about really bad code, it typically makes no noticeable difference. Code brevity, maintainability and other similar qualities have a far greater impact on your product.
However, there is a nuance I'd like to shed light on - big-O time (and memory) efficiency are the two most popular aspects of efficiency, but they're by no means the only aspects of efficiency. Us web developers can afford to pay less attention to those, but other types of inefficiency can make a huge difference: concurrency & async operations, for example, are cardinal to virtually any modern app, and bad performance in that aspect could lead to terrible results. A similar point goes for network operations, bundle sizes, and more.
Once again, in most cases writing clear and maintainable code is a top priority, and can be achieved without sacrificing any of those, but it's important to keep in mind that inefficiency in those aspects of your logic could significantly harm the overall result.
And again - great article, well done!
TOTALLY agree. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone stresses over tiny details of algorithmic "performance", but when you open the inspector, you can see that their app is making three identical
GETcalls to the exact same endpoint to retrieve the exact same data.Exactly 😂