So much in this article from Dan Luu resonates — it’s like holding up a mirror.

On average, humans have a high ability to ignore negatives in […] their own work or work their company does. For better or for worse, I seem to have the opposite of this and my thoughts immediately go to the flaws in myself and my work

Also:

overall, I don't know that I'd rate anything I've done as good.

Me too, Dan. Me too. (I should probably go to therapy for this, tbh.)

I've seen people and teams with a high degree of quality blindness ship things that have reduced or even no chance of success because of product quality issues. It's one thing to knowingly and deliberately trade off quality for speed, but when I've seen this happen there's always been a kind of quality blindness where everyone involved with the project thinks they're shipping something very high quality when that's not the case.

Been there. Seen that.

it's also easier than ever to improve quality, whether that's better performance, fewer bugs, etc.

But, to do this, you have to actually notice that this is possible, that quality can be improved.

It might be easier than ever from the perspective of automating tedious work, but I’d argue it’s harder than ever from an incentives perspective. It seems fewer and fewer people and organizations have the ability to notice quality issues in the first place, and so there are no incentives to allocate the time or resources to improve them.

I've tried to see if I can get a job somewhere where I just fix quality issues all day. This has never panned out

Dream job. If you’re looking for someone like that, reach out lol.

Some people love to make something. I love making something good.

This is funny, but also wise—I think? To be honest, it’s sort of my approach to blogging.

If I try to solve some a problem by doing what everyone else is doing and go looking for problems where everyone else is looking, if I want to do something valuable, I'll have to do better than a lot of people, maybe even better than everybody else if the problem is really hard. If the problem is considered trendy, a lot of very smart and hardworking people will be treading the same ground and doing better than that is very difficult. But I have a dumb thought, one that's too stupid sounding for anyone else to try, I don't necessarily have to be particularly smart or talented or hardworking to come up with valuable solutions. Often, the dumb solution is something any idiot could've come up with and the reason the problem hasn't been solved is because no one was willing to think the dumb thought until an idiot like me looked at the problem.

Why, in some cases, I measure for personal projects:

the impetus for my measurements is curiosity. I just want to know the answer to a question; most of the time, I don't write up my results.

Also, this random factoid:

As consumers, we should expect that any review that isn't performed by a trusted, independent, agency, that purchases its own review copies has been compromised and is not representative of the median consumer experience.

Remember who butters the bread of whatever “review” you read online.

Long before computers were invented, elders have been telling the next generation that they've done everything that there is to be done and that the next generation won't be able to achieve more. Even without knowing any specifics about programming, we can look at how well these kinds of arguments have held up historically and have decent confidence that the elders are not, in fact, correct this time.

...Brooks' 1986 claim that we've basically captured all the productivity gains high-level languages can provide isn't too different from an assembly language programmer saying the same thing in 1955, thinking that assembly is as good as any language can be and that his claims about other categories are similar. The main thing these claims demonstrate are a lack of imagination.

A good reminder, I would venture, that even core web technologies will be pushed in the future. You don’t have to accept everything that comes down the road of innovation, but being able and willing to keep an open imagination is what’s important.

For another level of ironic, consider that while I think of a 50kB table as bloat, this page is 12kB when gzipped, even with all of the bloat. Google's AMP currently has > 100kB of blocking javascript that has to load before the page loads! There's no reason for me to use AMP pages because AMP is slower than my current setup of pure HTML with a few lines of embedded CSS and the occasional image, but, as a result, I'm penalized by Google (relative to AMP pages) for not "accelerating" (deccelerating) my page with AMP.

I actually really enjoy the “design” (how it looks + works) of danluu.com. Also enjoyed this fact check:

The flaw in the “page weight doesn’t matter because average speed is fast” is that if you average the connection of someone in my apartment building (which is wired for 1Gbps internet) and someone on 56k dialup, you get an average speed of 500 Mbps.

This article is an exhaustive look at computer latency over the last few decades. The conclusion? Modern computers are significantly slower in keyboard-to-screen response time.

the default configuration of the powerspec g405, which had the fastest single-threaded performance you could get until October 2017, had more latency from keyboard-to-screen than sending a packet around the world.

Though the article deals specifically with detailing the degradations in latency of a keypress on computer hardware over the past few decades, I found this observation to be eerily similar to what’s happening with the degradations in speed of the web over the past few decades:

The solution to poor performance caused by “excess” complexity is often to add more complexity. In particular the gains we’ve seen that get us back to the quickness of the quickest machines from thirty to forty years ago have come not from listening to exhortations to reduce complexity, but from piling on more complexity.