Should I feel bad knowing that if I were project manager, I'd feel like someone wasted valuable time making the dashboard look so pretty? Am I an idiot just for assuming that was done in house?<p>Edit:<p>I'm not trying to make a case either way, but I look at the color scheme, specific typography decisions, and other small things that would have taken a non-trivial amount of time to work on or think about (ie, more than 10 minutes of actual focus) and think to myself: "If that were me, I'd feel like I was just goofing off"<p>Get the information there. Make sure its nice and and usable. This does more than that though, which is great. I personally just would feel like I was wasting time and energy worrying about picking a color scheme when I had other work to be done.<p>Third thought:
I appreciate the romantic justifications mentioned in the replies. I think they're fairly superficial, but they are romantic, and thats fine. I think the real difference here (and the root of the disagreement) has to do with why I associate this with 'waste of time'. There is obviously opportunity cost of doing this. I expect people most in favor of this stuff are salaried and not really concerned with opportunity cost. If I were salaried, I wouldn't feel like I was doing something wrong by doing this work because I'd do in <i>in addition</i> to my other work. I'd stay late and do it because I enjoyed doing it. I don't have that luxury where there isn't much opportunity cost because I'm paid by the hour. I don't work over-time. I'm not going to spend an extra hour at work one day to take care of this, so if its going to get done, its going to have to be prioritized over my other work. If picking colors (however important it is) is the most important thing on my to-do list, I have a problem.<p><i></i>TLDR<i></i>: I'm paid by the hour. Thats probably why I feel this way.
Github is generally pretty nippy for me, and it's a pleasure to work with.<p>Just 2 performance concerns I've noticed:<p>1. The network graph <a href="https://github.com/<username>/<repo>/network" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/<username>/<repo>/network</a> seems very sluggish to render<p>2. The API is slower than normal for HTTPS<p>Usage: $> time curl -i <a href="https://<site>/" rel="nofollow">https://<site>/</a>
For comparison (2nd request's):<p>* <a href="https://www.googleapis.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.googleapis.com/</a> <i>187ms</i><p>* <a href="https://graph.facebook.com/" rel="nofollow">https://graph.facebook.com/</a> <i>175ms</i><p>* <a href="https://api.github.com/" rel="nofollow">https://api.github.com/</a> <i>400-700ms</i><p>Not sure if anyone else noticed this
A couple of questions:<p>- What does the top chart represent that blends into the background?<p>- What is so costly about rendering pages for Googlebot that it takes almost twice as long as the average rendering time for public views? The throughput is especially interesting as it is less than 30% of its public equivalent.<p>- What does 1 cpu unit equal to?<p>- Also interesting to me is the fact that API requests require the most horsepower, yet also provide almost the lowest response time and very high throughput. How API requests are so different from "browser" requests, since I suspect both are powered by the same backend?<p>Sorry for my naivety.
Doesn't something have to be fast in order for it to be kept fast? My experience using the Github web frontend is one mostly of frustrating slowness, especially as of late.
Wow, those are some of the nicest reporting tools I've ever seen. Usually any application that involves measuring metrics like page load, average response times and whatnot looks horrible. It might be a small thing, but wow the design of that dashboard is really nice.<p>Github are absolutely killing it right now.
Reminds me of <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/performance-is-a-feature.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/performance-is-a-fe...</a> :<p>"The simple act of putting a render time in the upper right hand corner of every page we serve forced us to fix all our performance regressions and omissions. [...]<p>Most of the performance fixes were trivial, and even the ones that were not turned into fantastic opportunities to rearchitect and make things simpler and faster for all of our users."<p>Stackexchange open sourced their profiler at <a href="http://miniprofiler.com/" rel="nofollow">http://miniprofiler.com/</a> (.NET & Ruby)<p>The post provides some data showing how they improved their site performance over time where Github just states they have a strategy to use "powerful internal tools that expose and explain performance metrics". Guess it's just common sense now.
The mission control bar looks very familiar. Although I can't remember the name of it now, I seem to remember there being a debug bar of sorts that worked with merb/rails projects that had the same type of look. Anyone remember the name of it?<p>Edit:<p>I was thinking of FiveRuns Tune-Up toolbar.