I don't know how they perceive the performance. I see 41 network requests. That's 2.1 MB of CSS over the wire, blocking rendering and hurting painting and loading speed. There's 400 KB of Tailwind, 87 KB of general CSS, plus another 200 KB of other general CSS. They need to embrace functional CSS properly. I'm sure they could have a single CSS file under 80 KB that renders everything.
These type of comments often come from a place of arm-chair reasoning where you might not sit on the experience of working hands-on in a large team on a large product. While it’s probably true that X kB sufficient, that amount of performance optimisation is usually not warranted at this scale. Maintaining a design system, working with scoped classes, legacy code, and dealing with the complexities of chunking and probably further challenges we are not aware of from the outside. It seems like a common sentiment on HN (maybe not you in particular) is that engineers should drop everything and work overtime on optimizing performance, when it comes to web apps
The thing is that you're 100% right but the other person is also 100% right.
It is in fact really really really hard to keep things lean and performant over time as you support a more complex multi-purpose web app, but you still have to try. If you try hard enough - especially now in the age of pretty good agents - you can actually thread all of the different needles and keep (perceived and actual) latency low.
meerita · · focus · HN ↗
karolusrex · · focus · HN ↗
meowface · · focus · HN ↗
It is in fact really really really hard to keep things lean and performant over time as you support a more complex multi-purpose web app, but you still have to try. If you try hard enough - especially now in the age of pretty good agents - you can actually thread all of the different needles and keep (perceived and actual) latency low.