How a Car Works is an incredible resource—literally building an entire car from scratch, starting from the engine block.
And it’s amazing how often “performance” comes up.
Building a car, performance is constantly top-of-mind. How does the block’s material affect its fuel economy? How does vibration in the crankshaft affect RPM?
It’s all about precision.
“About 60% of the engine’s power gets lost in friction from the piston assembly, so any improvements to that make a huge difference to the power output of an engine.”
“80–90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend. Start there.”
Gotta love a good Pareto Principle when you see one!
I think this could be a really interesting angle to take teaching web performance: spotting the “pareto points”, those parts of the engine, or the parts of web design, that have a disproportionate impact on performance.
Really though, just the idea of breaking down a website and building it back up from scratch with the same level of rich detail and raw demonstration that How a Car Works shows would be so helpful—nothing detached or abstract, everything grounded in context as you build up the site.
I think this is where I want to go next: build a site from scratch and talk about each element of performance in rich, loving detail.
I’ve circled the philosophy of performance long enough, it’s time to get down to the metal.
Next up: the world’s fastest website…
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P.S. Expect more car metaphors. I’m enjoying this series so much, I may just end up buying myself a junk car to tear apart in the backyard.
P.S. Expect more car metaphors. I’m enjoying this series so much, I may just end up buying myself a junk car to tear apart in the backyard.