I wish we lived in a world where software development metrics prioritized the efficiency of the software. As it stands, what's incentivized is adding layers to pre-existing work, with as large of a team as managers can assemble, as often as is possible.
It used to be that if someone wasn't running advanced image/video/CAD edit software, or playing the latest AAA games, then not much memory was needed. Now it isn't uncommon for loading a few web pages with game guides, and having an active chat window, to take up more resources than the game itself, despite the web pages and chat windows mostly displaying text and pre-rendered images, while the game performs complex physics calculations and renders live 3D imagery.
tl;dr: Measure the energy use of your systems! Both on the server and the client side. You could save energy and money, and also have a really good excuse to have fun optimizing your code :)
I wish we lived in a world where software development metrics prioritized the efficiency of the software. As it stands, what's incentivized is adding layers to pre-existing work, with as large of a team as managers can assemble, as often as is possible.
It used to be that if someone wasn't running advanced image/video/CAD edit software, or playing the latest AAA games, then not much memory was needed. Now it isn't uncommon for loading a few web pages with game guides, and having an active chat window, to take up more resources than the game itself, despite the web pages and chat windows mostly displaying text and pre-rendered images, while the game performs complex physics calculations and renders live 3D imagery.
Just watched this talk and posted it to HN (sorry for the dupe!), Bert made a lot of great points in under 45 minutes!
There was some technical trouble in the first minutes, so skip to 4:46 (https://youtu.be/XntLynSlYjI?t=286) to get to the talk.
tl;dr: Measure the energy use of your systems! Both on the server and the client side. You could save energy and money, and also have a really good excuse to have fun optimizing your code :)