Despite scrolling at approximately 5 frames per second in a crowded inbox, billions of people use Gmail every single day without mass-migrating to a “faster” email client.

This should indicate something uncomfortable about how we spend our time as engineers.

The Inconvenient Truth About Speed

We treat performance like a moral virtue. A slow app is a bad app, built by lazy developers. A fast app is a good app, built by craftspeople .

However, the reality is different. Gmail performs slowly. Slack consumes so much RAM that it seems to be teaching a language model. And whenever you access a board in Jira, you feel like the universe is on the verge of heat death.…