I’ve been getting back in the weeds of things, raw engineering instead of just theorizing. It feels good to get my hands dirty with code, feel the pain of everyday problems (“Why isn’t webpack working?” “How come my CSS won’t load?” “How am I supposed to…?”).

How do we talk about performance at this raw, everyday level? 

Abstractions are inevitable—that’s literally what software is. But somehow I want to viscerally sense what’s going on. Not just metrics, not just theory, not just high-level patterns and code, no… Somewhere down here I want to understand physically what performance is, what it means, and how I should feel about it—how I can feel my way through it.

I want to learn about web performance the way people learn about cars.

What makes an engine start? How do I go fast? When I look under the hood and see all these parts and wires, where should I even start?

There’s a huge overlap between performance and general engineering. I mean, shoot, you can’t make a thing work well without understanding how it works first (at least, not on purpose). So on one hand, good performance is simply good engineering, but on the other hand it’s set apart. Performance is its own discipline, much like accessibility. It’s a specialized superset of knowledge and skills on top of those core competencies.

Does that mean performance should be left to the experts? Something we only teach in dev graduate school?

I’ve gotta believe performance can be a gateway too, a lens for developers to look through.

Maybe I just need to start something new myself to see that angle more clearly.

Guess it’s time I started learning about cars, huh?