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Performance Is Not a Technical Problem - Shu Ding

shud.in · 1,071 words · saved by 1 readers

After 400 performance PRs, I learned the problem isn't code or tools—it's entropy. And you can't fix entropy with a patch.

Performance Is Not a Technical Problem Over the past 7 years at Vercel, I have opened ~400 pull requests focused on performance. 1 in every 10. Waterfalls eliminated. Bundle sizes cut. Cache keys fixed. Re-renders removed. People ask me why. They think I am fixing broken code. I thought that too. But over time, I learned something: these are not technical problems. The same mistakes kept appearing. Different engineers. Different codebases. Different times. We have faster frameworks. Better compilers. Smarter linters. Performance still degrades. The problem is not the code. The problem is not t

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