If you’ve been following my last two posts, you already know about the journey of my friend, who’s gearing up to start an e-commerce business. I’ve been helping him with the tech side. This is our third meetup, and this time, we made sure to avoid distractions, no chaiwalay bhai interrupting us like last time! 😜

We decided to skip the local chai ka hotel. We met at Haveli Restaurant at Five Star Chowrangi, because brainstorming deserves a better ambiance, right? 😜

Now, back to the topic. So far, we’ve mapped out the requirements, APIs, data models, high-level architecture, and even touched on UI/UX design. Today’s agenda? Performance optimization.

As many of you know, no matter how exceptional your UI/UX, backend functionality, or mobile responsiveness is, if your app takes too long to load, users won’t stick around. They’ll leave, and all your hard work (and investments) will sink like a stone.

When building an application, performance optimization is non-negotiable. I shared some key considerations with my friend to spark our discussion:

• How can we optimize the app?
• What about compressing images?
• Can we reduce the bundle size?
• What’s our approach to lazy loading?
• How do we handle errors effectively?
• What role does local storage play?
  

I didn’t want my friend to dive too deeply into technicalities just yet, but I wanted to hear his thoughts on how we could tackle these challenges. After explaining each concept and its pros, his takeaway was clear: “We need to prioritize performance from day one.”

He stressed the importance of building a lightning-fast, user-friendly application to ensure users enjoy a smooth experience. Together, we brainstormed practical solutions:

• Using webpack to minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML during production.
• Leveraging tools like image-webpack-loader or external plugins for image compression.
• Implementing CDNs for faster image delivery.
• Utilizing caching and lazy loading for a seamless user experience.

As we dug into these ideas, our order arrived: malai boti, reshmi kabab, and chicken tikka 🫠.

Over delicious food, we also discussed code reusability and other possibilities. However, our conversation was cut short when my friend got an urgent call and had to leave.

There’s still so much left to cover, observability, SEO, and what users see immediately after the site loads. These are crucial topics we’ll dive into during our next meetup.

Stay tuned for the next chapter of this journey as i tried my best to pull in a designer who will play his part and we continue to craft the tech blueprint for his e-commerce venture!