React Performance ⚡
Intro
👨💼 Hello, my name is Peter the Product Manager. I'm here to help you get
oriented and to give you your assignments for the workshop!
We're going to be working hard to make our React applications as fast as
possible. There are a seemingly countless number of optimizations you can apply
in the persuit of a faster web application, but not all of them will actually
improve the user experience. It takes a careful amount of measuring, testing,
and remeasuring to really improve UX.
Additionally, we're going to focus on the React side of things for this
workshop, but there are many areas where you can improve performance for web
applications that we'll not be covering.
In general, the thing you need to know about performance optimizations is that
there's nothing faster than not doing anything at all. Every feature you add to
the application is going to make it slower in exchange for the thing you're
asking the computer to do. So we're not targeting
0ms load and response times.
Instead, we're targeting "fast enough for our users."At the same time, we're not going to be complacent about performance. Always be
on the lookout for opportunities to make your application faster in practical
ways.
A lot of this workshop involves very few lines of code changes. The real work
comes down to understanding how to measure performance properly, then
understanding the tools and the techniques, and then applying them to your
own applications in a way that actually improves performance.
Sometimes using performance optimization strategies can make your application
slower, so developing a good understanding of how things work is important.
A word of caution. It's easy to get carried away with performance
optimizations. Every optimization you make is a tradeoff (mostly in
complexity). It's important to measure the impact of your changes and to make
sure that the tradeoff is worth it. Don't optimize prematurely.
With that, let's get started!