If you need something to piss off a WMF developer

[ericbarbour]

Make them read this.

https://www.nray.dev/blog/300ms-faster- ... king-time/

It was featured on the front page of Hacker News and Reddit today. Someone must have noticed.

[rubricatedseedpod]

When I profiled Wikipedia’s mobile site, I found that an _enable method was responsible for most of the execution time. This method initialized the mobile site’s section expansion and collapsing behavior. The profile also showed that, within the _enable method, a call to jQuery’s .on("click") method was slow.

Give mobile a fucking TOC. The dynamic web was a mistake.

Step 1: Remove unnecessary JavaScript

You mean all of it?

The .on("click") call attached a click event listener to nearly every link in the content so that the corresponding section would open if the clicked link contained a hash fragment. For short articles with few links, the performance impact was negligible. But long articles like ”United States” included over 4,000 links, leading to over 200ms of execution time on low-end devices.

WMF devs are insane! This is the software equivalent of uprooting an entire tree from your orchard, then towing it to a processing plant to have the apples filtered out, only to find that all the apples dropped off along the way, left to the worms. This is what happens when your workforce stays with you out of untenable delusions of altruism, instead of for competitive wages.

[Bbb23sucks]

This is what happens when your workforce stays with you out of untenable delusions of altruism, instead of for competitive wages.

No, I'd say it's actually the opposite. Look at the Blender Foundation. They have about 100th the budget the WMF has, and they develop software that is actually good and capable. You know why? Because they employ programmers who are actually good and passionate about what they do.

That said, passion isn't magic. But, employing code monkey wages slaves won't get anywhere.

In the long run, bad programmers cost more than an saving in salary, benefits, or changes to workplace culture. Sure, you might save couple bucks in the short term. But in the long term, you'll be left with an unworkable, undocumented, dumpster fire mess of code like the WMF has. At that point, the only way out is rewriting the whole codebase and hiring new staff. But they'll never do that. They'll just keep digging the hole deeper and deeper until they eventually go bankrupt (which will hopefully happen soon).

[rubricatedseedpod]

No, I'd say it's actually the opposite. Look at the Blender Foundation. They have about 100th the budget the WMF has, and they develop software that is actually good and capable. You know why? Because they employ programmers who are actually good and passionate about what they do.

My point is that people with a passion for contributing to something like Blender will generally have much more sense than people with the same passion for Wikimedia, which probably involves stupidity or a fetish for power. Apart from that, yes, there have been many successful software projects that have essentially relied on volunteers for the majority of their code, though they are doomed battle with structural problems created by the patchwork of incremental contributions. But make no mistake, the issue documented in the blog post must have created by one person, who made the incompetent decision to solve a simple problem in one of the most expensive ways open to them. The messiness of the rest of the code would have been no obstacle to avoiding the issue in this case.

[Bbb23sucks]

though they are doomed battle with structural problems created by the patchwork of incremental contributions.

Elaborate.

[rubricatedseedpod]

Elaborate.

This video describes the way things deteriorated in one project after years of open-source development, and the difficulty of sorting it out.

[Bbb23sucks]

Elaborate.

This video describes the way things deteriorated in one project after years of open-source development, and the difficulty of sorting it out.

Thanks, I don't feel like watching the whole thing now though. Could you give me a summary? Otherwise, I'll watch it tomorrow.

[rubricatedseedpod]

Thanks, I don't feel like watching the whole thing now though. Could you give me a summary? Otherwise, I'll watch it tomorrow.

Just watch until 7:54. The rest is mainly an advertisment.