The GitHub website is slow on Safari

The GitHub website reminds me of the first video in the Clean Coders series, where he points out that eventually devs want a total rewrite to "Fix" all the shortcomings, but GitHub from the perspective of most users had nothing UI wise that needed fixing. We all would have been happy with the UI as is.

Clean code argues that instead of total rewrites you should focus on gradual improvements over time, refactor code so that overtime you pay off the dividends, without re-living through all the bugs you lived through 5 years ago that you don't recall the resolution of. Every rewrite project I've ever worked on, we run into bugs we had already fixed years prior, or the team before me has.

There are times when a total rewrite might be the best and only options such as deprecated platforms (think of like Visual Basic 6 apps that will never get threading).

What frustrates me more is that GitHub used to be open to browse, and the search worked, now in their effort to force you to make an account (I HAVE LIKE TEN ALREADY) and force you to login, they include a few "dark patterns" where parts of search don't work at all.

Rewrite is usually about learning about all the past mistakes and problems and designing your architecture in a way that you prevent all the previously known issues. It is iterative process on the design level. If you end up repeating all the same bugs, it went very wrong from the beginning. So if you don’t have the information about all the previous problems, then it is likely mistake.

It reminds me also of the original head of development of the Safari browser talking about at least the early days of building the browser. They had a rule that no commit of code could cause the browser benchmarks to get slower. And apparently he was maniacal about the rule.

I don’t know if that’s a good or realistic rule for most projects, but I imagine for performant types of applications, that’s exactly what it takes to prevent eventual slowdown.

That reminds me of Linus' attitude about breaking userspace for security fixes.