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Oh, by the way, since the optimisations I made on the bundle size, it now takes ~3.61 seconds to download and install Kitten¹ on my machine and ~1 second to update it (the initial install takes longer as Kitten downloads its own Node.js runtime and that takes the bulk of the time).
Every second you don’t spend waiting for something is a second you can spend doing something else 
PS. In case you wonder why I care about a few seconds of difference…
@aral that's a very thoughtful piece. I used to work on software used by long haul truckers. Coworkers would often dismiss my ui/usability concerns as "minor annoyances." I would frequently think about how the "minor annoyances" of our app would make a difficult day worse, which could cause rage or exhaustion, which could cause road safety issues. Or even a delay, meaning a driver might not make it home to their kid's soccer game.
It's wild when you start to think of users as human beings.
@samthurston @aral yes, indeed, thank you, for sharing your experience, and for your users.
@samthurston @aral There’s a whole thing about this too in terms of the cumulative burden of authentication that a lot of IT people and security staff don’t think about, but it imposes real costs and losses on end users who either start circumventing security or losing productivity.
(This is not paywalled and has no ads or trackers or anything.)
@samthurston @aral Software development is more than just coding. The human factor will become more important and shows the difference between people and organisations that actually care and those that blindly create a product that, when you throw it hard enough, will stick to a wall. It is a valuable thing to have users that support you product and your product that supports its users.
@aral Nice. Reminds me of a colleague who, whenever there was an unnecessary software frustration, would shake his head and mutter “what a senseless waste of life”.
@edavies @aral Was he possibly a Monty Python fan? That is a quote that their “Cheese Shop” sketch ends on. “What a senseless waste of human life!” 
It’s very sad that I have that etched into my brain. I had a collection of their sketches on 8-track tape and would listen to them in my car circa 1981 (my first and last year with an 8 track in a car)
@aral When I was first learning about computer programming in school, back in the 1980s, one of the main requirements in most of the exercises was that the program's response to the user should appear instantaneous. This was back in the days where offline batch-processing was still a thing but even now I think this should still apply to most user experiences.
@hamishtpb And it can be if you’re not also busy auctioning off the person to the highest bidder in the background.