Is the gap between "good developers" and "bad developers" getting wider?
At one end of the scale we have people like my former colleague Glenn ( http://vanderburg.org/Blog ) who are doing such esoteric software stuff that I am not even sure what he is talking about anymore... things like "domain specific languages" i.e. to solve the problem, first write a new programming language optimised for that problem domain... okay...
and at the other end we have the vendor who coded this:
Select column1 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
Select column2 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
Select column3 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
Select column4 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
Select column5 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
which took 140ms to run when "Select column1, column2, column3, column4, column5 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser" took 15ms...
Sure, rubbish code has always been with us but i just have the sense that the gap is getting wider not narrower... that despite the fact that we have a wealth of coding standards, patterns and practices at our finger tips (just Google it) and that languages and development environments are more powerful than ever that power is delivering more dross not less.
What do you all think?
I must confess that this one had slipped past me… I wasn’t aware that Alexa was now offering performance rankings as well! Alexa now shows an “average load time” as well as a “comparitive ranking” (i.e. 51% of sites are slower). Interesting data for your next website analysis! It’s worth noting that the quoted “1.404 seconds” is about the same as the “repeat view” measurement webpagetest.org (testing from the UK node shows that www.johnlewis.com takes about 7.2 seconds to load with an empty cache, and 1.6 seconds with a primed cache, median values over 5 runs). Presumably this is an average across all Alexa toolbar users, on all johnlewis.com pages (large and small) with empty and primed caches.
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