Making it Faster, For Your Own Sake

It's the small things that build trust over time.

Hey folks,

I spent the morning walking through some of the “heavier” parts of the app, which aren’t many to be honest as there are really only 2 views that require requests of any significance: The All Contacts Page and the Editor Page.

The former makes a number of requests to our database to verify the user and an assortment of other important properties like delivery dates, emails, and so forth. The requests are small but important.

Simplifying something that works always feels a bit precarious — why attempt to “fix” what isn’t fundamentally broken?

The short answer, at least for me, is about building trust with the user. So what if you think you can improve a sub-2 second load on the first view 100%? Well, if you put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment and imagine that you’ve just received an important notification to check-in and verify that you’re still alive — you’d want to get to that verification screen as fast as humanly possible, right? Any delay, even the smallest, can feel agonizing.

So this morning I set out on a quest to see if we could make any significant improvements that would make it feel even faster.

Fo starters, I applied a lazy loading (with suspense fallbacks) to reduce the bundle by 40%. This is approximately 150kb in size. I even used existing patterns so I didn’t have to create anything from scratch. Secondly, I consolidated API endpoints from 2 to 1 making it about 40-80ms faster on initial load. Essentially a parallel database query using a shared authentication. And thirdly, some “smart” cacheing for return visitors using an existing middleware pattern and a smaller TTL.

Does it feel faster now? I think so. Would most of our users even notice? Maybe not. But perhaps that’s because I’m paying closer attention than most.

And that’s the point (and a solid reminder to builders): We know what excellence is but oftentimes we ignore these signals and the accrual over time makes the product unremarkable and unfocused.

And you become less proud of what you’ve built and that’s the beginning of the end.

Talk soon,

Eight