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Dev.to is fast - But ... How?

Sm0ke on March 25, 2020

Hello Dev Stuff, This is an open discussion addressed to Dev.to engineers especially, regarding the deployment architecture. I was amazed a few mo...

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Tyler V. (he/him) • Mar 25 '20

You might be interested in this post from Ben:

Making dev.to Incredibly fast

Ben Halpern ・ Feb 2 '17 ・ 5 min read

#webperf #meta

Sm0ke • Mar 25 '20 • Edited

Thanks for the link. The article explains some basic stuff, useful indeed but unrelated to the macro architecture used by the service.
Also, I noticed that the content is displayed contextually. If you access Dev.to using incognito mode in browser the information is different compared to authenticated sessions.
I might be wrong, but the information is personalized based on (at least) two factors:

followed channels (this is a common technique)
cover item is updated if you already read that topic and refresh the page (I might be wrong on this)

This kind of "decision" should inject some decisional delay in the service speed. Well, Dev.to still scores 100 on Lighthouse, witch is amazing IMO.

Ben Halpern • Mar 25 '20

Another neat thing we do if you're curious... 😉

Instant Webpages and Terabytes of Data Savings Through the Magic of Service Workers ✨

Ben Halpern ・ Dec 18 '19 ・ 5 min read

#meta #webdev #javascript #webperf

Sm0ke • Mar 25 '20

Thank you Ben. I'll get back with more questions :)

Blair Jersyer • May 5 '20

According to recent studies and based on my personal experience, speed doesn't have a huge impact on SEO ranking. You should note Dev.to has a very huge domain score, pretty much post published here are referenced like within 1 hour and is available on Google. While I'm not saying speed doesn't matter, it looks like it's not the most important aspect that improves your ranking.