[jiggawatts]

I just had one of these people, a contractor working for a state government, argue vocally with me in a meeting stating that "500 JavaScript requests is not a problem" for a single page. Un-cached, of course, despite there being a CDN in front of the site.

You can't win against cargo-cult coders because they just assume you're from a different, competing cult.

They have no concept of engineering or science, they have never encountered it.

[josephg]

Heh this is one nice thing about doing engineering work in Australia. Our round-trip time to US data centers is often about 200ms. There’s no hiding from sloppy choices in the performance panel.

I had an argument a few weeks ago because our page took 4 serial requests before content appeared. I argued - with solid data - that it should be 1. If we could manage that, cold load time would ~ halve.

[re-thc]

> argue vocally with me in a meeting stating that "500 JavaScript requests is not a problem" for a single page

Where's the benchmark or at least the numbers? If not, that's not proof of anything. Nothing to argue about. I'd just laugh.

> You can't win against cargo-cult coders

You don't need to. Unless you're not in control or don't have influence then whatever. It shouldn't be about "winning". It's either some vote (hence influence) or there's a process e.g. PoC with backed numbers.

[jiggawatts]

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” -- Alberto Brandolini

I like to fight this kind of asinine "push back" by simply reversing the time order:

Here's an app that does 5 CDN-cached requests of its JavaScript. Demonstrate why disabling the CDN cache and splitting that into 500 individual requests is better.