Rent's due today, thank heavens I just got paid.
I don't set up standing orders, got burned once with unarranged overdraft fees, that wasn't a good mont...
The thing is, these mantras are always taken out of context.
“Memory is cheap” is in comparison to other options. For example, if you have a the choice between optimizing for CPU or memory, you should optimize for CPU almost every time because it’s a lot cheaper to add more RAM than add more CPU.
But for some reason, we’ve taken this to mean, “I don’t need to optimize memory or CPU because I can just upgrade them.” That’s only true until it isn’t, and it’s generally easier to optimize things as you go than optimize once everything is broken.
Good post. I really don’t understand how apps have gotten so terrible.
The app I work on is slow, but that’s because we’re doing pretty heavy things (3D canvas stuff), but even then we do a really bad job of lazy loading stuff (e.g. images used for that 3D stuff are loaded way before you get to the 3D part, and many users don’t use the 3D feature at all in a session).
But at least we have an excuse. Why does the bank app take forever to load when it just needs to query around balances and submit tasks to their backend to process? That should be incredibly lightweight.
I honestly think a big part of it is the hacky nature of the self-made dev. There’s an emphasis on getting it working instead of getting it right. Work fast, crash fast, and get it limping along faster.
I might know the answer to your last point. I have experience working with financial services and large old institutions.
In short the front end is likely lighting fast and lightweight but the services it relies are incredibly old and outdated. Like mainframes running COBOL old. There is likely some abstraction but there are also likely literal decades of technical debt. Sometimes a call to understand what should be simple like what accounts does this client have might need to call multiple legacy systems that were integrated over the course of multiple acquisitions.
Believe it or not but I’ve seen the mobile apps be required to use totally different abstraction layers than websites, usually due to different authentication and access management methods.
“Back-end” is often relative when talking about these old systems. There are sometimes multiple layers of abstraction with different business logic built into each layer.
It’s fixable of course, but it is costly to unwind 30-40 years of bad technical decisions made by business people who never understood the systems they were making decisions for.
That sounds like a cop-out to me. Surely they could have snapshots of data in a more reasonable system to make common operations fast (mostly querying data), while keeping the old systems as the source of truth, no? We do that, and we have far fewer customers than a major bank does…
The thing is, these mantras are always taken out of context.
“Memory is cheap” is in comparison to other options. For example, if you have a the choice between optimizing for CPU or memory, you should optimize for CPU almost every time because it’s a lot cheaper to add more RAM than add more CPU.
But for some reason, we’ve taken this to mean, “I don’t need to optimize memory or CPU because I can just upgrade them.” That’s only true until it isn’t, and it’s generally easier to optimize things as you go than optimize once everything is broken.
Good post. I really don’t understand how apps have gotten so terrible.
The app I work on is slow, but that’s because we’re doing pretty heavy things (3D canvas stuff), but even then we do a really bad job of lazy loading stuff (e.g. images used for that 3D stuff are loaded way before you get to the 3D part, and many users don’t use the 3D feature at all in a session).
But at least we have an excuse. Why does the bank app take forever to load when it just needs to query around balances and submit tasks to their backend to process? That should be incredibly lightweight.
I honestly think a big part of it is the hacky nature of the self-made dev. There’s an emphasis on getting it working instead of getting it right. Work fast, crash fast, and get it limping along faster.
I might know the answer to your last point. I have experience working with financial services and large old institutions.
In short the front end is likely lighting fast and lightweight but the services it relies are incredibly old and outdated. Like mainframes running COBOL old. There is likely some abstraction but there are also likely literal decades of technical debt. Sometimes a call to understand what should be simple like what accounts does this client have might need to call multiple legacy systems that were integrated over the course of multiple acquisitions.
For my bank the website works fast, but app does not. So an old backend is not always the issue.
Believe it or not but I’ve seen the mobile apps be required to use totally different abstraction layers than websites, usually due to different authentication and access management methods.
“Back-end” is often relative when talking about these old systems. There are sometimes multiple layers of abstraction with different business logic built into each layer.
It’s fixable of course, but it is costly to unwind 30-40 years of bad technical decisions made by business people who never understood the systems they were making decisions for.
That sounds like a cop-out to me. Surely they could have snapshots of data in a more reasonable system to make common operations fast (mostly querying data), while keeping the old systems as the source of truth, no? We do that, and we have far fewer customers than a major bank does…
Major bank
There’s your answer