An oldie but goodie. Joseph has some great points in his slides:
"Everyone is amazed by fast apps. It hardly matters what else they do! Everyone hates slow apps. It hardly matters what else they do..."
"All your projects start off as blank web pages [which are really fast]. So, if they're slow, it's because you let them get slow. You let too many features and UIs get in there to the point where it wasn't fast, but if you can hold the line, then you can keep your app fast and refuse to not let it be fast."
This seems to be the best sharing widget available for chrome. Works well with Posterous too!
So what does it all mean? Well, here’s a Sinatra application that uses plain old ActiveRecord and is completely asynchronous! Try ab -n 100 -c 20 http://localhost:9292/test to hit the app with 20 concurrent connections; it will process them all in parallel, without any painful threading issues (autoloading, misbehaving extensions, etc). Awesome!
The real lesson for me is this: People want the basics done well. Does it look good, does it feel good, is it comfortable, is it clear, is it easy? No matter what you’re selling, those seem to be the things that really matter. Get those right and you’ve got a great shot at building a successful product and business.
