Making applications work is the responsibility of many developers. However, when building new systems, we often forget the non-functional aspects such as performance and reliability. In this post, I’ll focus on developing with performance in mind, which is already the philosophy of the best software engineers.
Performance has a significant impact on revenue.
Users naturally want applications that respond quickly, and recent research shows that 25 percent of users stop using websites if load times take 4 seconds or longer. For a company with a revenue of 1M, such a slowdown means losing $250.000 each year.
It all boils down to the programming languages—the basis of our human-to-machine interaction—that developers use to code. As it’s known, this source code is used to write algorithms that solve given problems. Unfortunately, complex applications can contain several million lines of code. As a result, finding solutions for the given problems can be a case of trial and error. The design patterns released by the software engineering industry go a long way in addressing many of these problems—helping us to implement the best solution. As yet, however, no design patterns address performance issues.
If you are among the many who neglect this all-important aspect of performance, you’ll keep running into similar problems. For example, you’ll find that applications are hanging and that loading is slow, not to mention the reliability issues that keep cropping up—all due to a lack of knowledge in coding for performance.
Performetriks is providing the unique training course ‘Developing with Performance in Mind’ to fill this gap. The training, consisting of about 100 coding sessions, guides engineers on coding for high-performance applications. Additionally, attendees learn valuable dos and don’ts to add to their best practices.
Who should attend this training?
The training will hugely benefit engineers with software-development experience in any programming language. The typical mix of people attending our tutorials includes:
developers
architects
test and performance engineers
The screenshot below highlights the way we guide participants through the training. We share our experience on how small mistakes can result in massive performance slowdowns. We also show good and bad coding practices, execute both statements, measure response times, and present the processing time to the trainee.
Front-end development for performance
Developing modern web applications can be a massive front-end programming challenge. Our training provides over 20 best practices for achieving optimal front-end performance antipatterns.
Backend development for performance
Fast and reliable services are now essential to providing an excellent user experience. However, from a performance perspective, many pitfalls await the developers implementing backend services. The way data structures are handled, for example is among the many challenges that can have a massive impact on response times. Our training provides developers with some excellent insights into backend coding-related performance issues, so the developers learn how to avoid these issues—resulting in top performance.
General coding for performance advice
Algorithms are at the core of our business applications. Unfortunately, developers gradually fall into coding pitfalls when they focus on doing the application work. The errors that result then lead to massive performance slowdowns. Our training helps build awareness on avoiding these classic coding for performance mistakes.
Testing for performance
Coding for performance helps developers avoid the common antipatterns and improves the software quality. When your testing team executes the test cases, they can’t predict how your application will behave when it hits the production volumes. Running load and performance testing allows you to simulate thousands of concurrent users on your new application and verify that performance extends to the boundaries as required.
Monitoring for performance
Following deploying the new application on production, you need to be proactive. You need to understand the end-to-end performance and availability of your most important business cases. Continuous performance monitoring on production allows you to mimic actual user actions. For example, suppose performance or availability still falls short of your requirements. In that case, a notification will be sent to your preferred communication channel, alerting your teams, so they can fix those issues before your customers are impacted.
Summary
Building responsive and reliable applications involves these 4 areas:
setting the performance requirements
coding for performance
testing for performance
monitoring for performance
Performetriks is a global performance engineering service provider. Contact us today and book a two-hour Developing with Performance in Mind training slot.
Keep doing the excellent work! Happy coding for performance!