Billions of people deal with slow web apps that collectively waste millions of years of people's lives so that the a few developers can save a few hours of work.
We could increase global white collar productivity by 10-20% almost immediately if developers would stop valuing their productivity over the productivity of their end users.
I have worked on quite a few Ruby web apps and built quite a few myself. Maybe 3% of the cases I encountered were about Ruby not being performant enough to do what I needed it to do. Where did the rest of the productivity of end users get lost?
Org dysfunction.
Note that those were web apps - so the user did not have to install the runtime, dependencies etc. to use the software. That is a whole other story (and not a very merry one, at least for all the scripting languages out there).
I find this funny because I'm sure you can find examples where users themselves demand things that are overall less efficient. But, you're not wrong, there are efficiency gains to unlock on both sides.
It's not you, it is bad. It has been getting better. Developing with Jetpack Compose is a nearly a clone of the experience of building with SwiftUI in Xcode. Android Studio and the emulators are resource pigs still.
I've been working on this in stealth mode for awhile now, wanted to announce that we're officially opening up our Alpha Pilot sign-up for Searchcraft!
What is Searchcraft? It's a developer-focused SaaS platform for developers to quickly integrate a highly performant content search into their apps. We built it from the ground-up in Rust, so far the metrics are really promising and we're seeing far better performance for queries per second and concurrent connections than Elasticsearch, Aloglia and Typesense.
I work at a consultancy that does a lot of app builds for small companies/start-ups that need to add search quickly. The dev time to integrate the existing options like Elasticsearch take far too long. We believe developers should focus on building features that make their products great, not toiling away on building search. Search often times takes specialized knowledge to build properly and startups typically don't have the time and budget to dedicate to this. Having experience the pain of working with tools like Elasticsearch first hand, we knew we could built something with a better developer experience.
Our first version that we’ll be launching for our Alpha Pilot cohort will be a smaller subset of our features but we'll be giving away access to this for the first 1000 who sign up on the waitlist. When the beta phase launches we'll be rolling out the first of many SDK integrations. I would love to hear about what you are building and if there is a way that Searchcraft can help.
