Shanti’s Dispatches

Just got another annoying criticism in the comments on this ThinkVitamin article about how to optimize your Ajax in Ruby on Rails.

What I Probably Should’ve Done

Taken a screencast of what loading conversations was like in Mailroom before my optimizations, and one afterwards. And then gone on to show how this was done.

That was basically the entire point of writing the article, yet of course you always get annoying blowhards piping in on how your code sucks in this way or that way. Like optimizing for another 5-20% speed improvement really matters when, literally, the user-noticeable lag is already down to 300 milliseconds or less. Okay, fine — your improvements would get it to 200 milliseconds as opposed to 250 milliseconds.

Never mind… like, y’know, building 80% of the features of GMail with just a team of 1 full-time backend developer and 1 part-time frontend developer.

The Big Trick

The big optimization trick that was used to reduce the noticeable lag time was having the HTML cached on the client side. When the user clicked on a conversation, basically one big “eval()” statement was called and the conversation was rendered. Making it fucking lightning fast.

I’ve told this story to a few developers, etc in the past who read about these optimizations on my resume or whatever, and they’re always like “oh…. that’s how.” Basically as if it’s cheating to actually do that.

Why I Love Those Cheesy “Making Money Online” Blogs

I love blogs like Shoemoney and Steve Pavlina because those guys have already “made it” and are simply sharing their wisdom (or talking about what they did to get where they are).

I’m sure Steve and Shoemoney get their fair share of trolls and critics, but it must feel damn good to post a screenshot of your monthly earnings that looks like:

This, in not so many words, says to anyone who has achieved maybe 1/100th of that level of success:

Suck. My. Wang. (comma) Bitches.

Oh and merry christmas!

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos