Three weeks ago I bought a 750gb external drive for around $100, including tax. Three days ago I saw an even better deal for the same size. The cheap cost of space is really quite astounding if you look back in time.
5 years ago... Well, my current computer, I am about to swap out this friday has 80gb
15 years ago... My work issued computer was a 486dx-32mhz with a 120mb drive. Whohooo, or as they say in the Bronx, "fuuugettaboutit"
I remember back in the late nineties building web content and worrying about what impact adding a 3k or 4k graphic would do. Today I am having a hard time keeping up with the fact I can add video, graphics, build gnarley dynamic apps and not have to sweat a major load about disk space. We can thank the invention of
perpendicular recording back in 2005 for these advances in disk space.
Further, memory is cheap as well. We can quadruple memory today for the same price we paid 3-4 years ago.
And, I do not want to forget the low level infrastructure developers for their advances and optimizations in webserver and rdbms software.
Development has always been a field dominated by young bucks. But unlike us old geezers, they can't remember back to the prehistoric era when we were dealing with portable storage media that maxed out at 1.44mb, A hard drive of 40mb was the norm. You were envied by others if you had 80mb. And 512kb of memory was standard (like 2gb is today).
I am not just waxing nostalgic here. What I am trying to say is that back in that era, the hardware we had forced us to make technical design decisions that were germane to eaking out performance in the applications we developed. And, as a footnote to this, my technological forefathers would chuckle at me and say
"sonny, you don't know what lack of resources are. We programmed on punch cards and had to run and debug our programs when we could actually get a time slot on the mainframe that took up an area the size of your house and had 1/1000 of the resources that you get today on that there iPod of yers".
My point is that I grew up in an era when resources were at such a premium we had to seriously consider optimization in our application development. Even today I still develop with this mindset.
Today we can throw hardware at a problem.
But, I do think performance is a key issue an application developer needs to factor into their code. Okay, programming has changed for many of us. I remember having to design databases where a table packed everything into a row that was 2k or less. Writing apps in C one would need to write queues and stacks and ponder using the verb register for which variable. Declaring a pointer against a pool of memory that was the size of a thimble of water compared to todays 4-person hot tub.
But, still there are many things todays developer can do to optimize business apps. For one, minimize disk access. I see programs all the time that invoke multiple queries or stored procedures when only one is needed. Also, there is also nothing wrong with using integers as foreign keys in database design. Using quit loop functions once you have what you need can be a time saver.
A lot of optimization of course depends on matters like how many concurrent users your app will have to contend with. And, what is the intended use of the app is another prime consideration. There are many more.
I would be the first to admit that if you are writing an app that will only have a few users saving 10ms access time through varying your coding practices is not worth anyones time.
I remember many years ago a peer looking at a Perl program I had written and giving me an obtuse (in my opinion) way of doing the same thing. Well, first off, my program was a command line batch program that was going to be run maybe once a week at the most by one programmer on their pc (it was a code generator. I won't bore you with the details). But I was curious. So, I went back to my desk and created two scenarios. One coding my way, one the way I thought was obtuse, I ran them in loops executing 1 million times using a hi-res timer to benchmark performance. And, the dude was right-on, his was faster. By about 15 milliseconds total under my test scenario.
For my intended use it made zero sense to change the code to a coding convention that seemed very foreign to my way of thinking. Plus, I thought, hey the single end user of my app may not have time to go out and have a beer and get back fast enough with time savings like that. We must always be considering the needs of our customer.
On the other end of the spectrum, during the era when client server apps were in-vogue I saw some fat client apps written that would create and dump (errr...I mean deliver) 3-5mb of data to the client in one fell swoop, taking a couple of minutes to load. Hmmmm, I remember thinking the customer will really dig that. And, this story is from a time frame when 16mb was a standard physical memory footprint.
Today is such a cool time to be computing in. One can consider true multimedia solutions in their design and not have to worry about needing to sell the customer a cray to host the app. The emergence of mobile devices (even with their evil proprietary languages) is way cool as well. Streaming video still impresses me.
And, knowing within ten years that someone will figure out how to mainstream a monitor you can see in your glasses, and a virtual full sized keyboard to type on that can be tied to your handheld. I can just picture someone on the bus coming home from work (that would not BE ME!!!) madly typing away some flame email on a keyboard none of us can see. Man, I can't wait for that day :-)
