i've met a lot of great performance engineers in my (brief) experience. I’ve noticed 2 archetypes emerge:
1. "career" perf engineers: think framework authors, v8 engine devs. critical prod-level tooling where perf is a #1 requirement. think
@RyanCarniato w/ solid.js and
@trueadm w/ svelte/inferno
2. senior engineers working on apps at scale: think
@gao_jude at faire,
@getKonstantin
at brex. generally overhead ~= limits of tech choice * # of people
my current investment thesis is that this generally works because of manager~engineer symmetry. where perf is accurately correlated to an important KPI, and managers actually care about investing in perf because of that
ive noticed the long tail (>95%) have high asymmetry. usually the perf directly and negatively impacts sales. asymmetry = the investment is lower/higher than necessary
the #1 problem in this space isn't that perf issues don't exist - it's that the tools we use to understand performance are too limited. lighthouse scores may generally indicate perf - but managers might ask whether it's worth optimizing. engineers might not know where to get started. the barrier of entry - and the effort to finish is just too high.
the first version of million lint was small script that would count the number of times a component would run. it was small but super handy - finding the highest rendered components proved more useful than a generic score or page timing.
today, we've built full render tracking within your IDE and app. we tap directly into react fiber to grab timing and render data. we process that and display it in your IDE. we run complex algorithms and language models to suggest changes and improve code.
my hope is that the next version of million lint will take a step further. what if we can help empower engineering teams to resolve perf requirement asymmetry AND help engineers (not just archetypes 1 & 2) contribute to improving perf.
and that's what we're going to do.
new version dropping ~tomorrow. until then, back to building.