You were right if it would take a lot of resourses to make things fast. But most of the time it doesn't.
I made a lot of sites fast(er) in maybe 4 hours time. Yes, slow frameworks are slow so you cannot change that in 4 hours time. But most frameworks arent that slow.
My work involved: rewriting a slow query used on every page, changing PNGs to JPEG and reducing the resolution, moving an event that is fired on every DOM redraw, and so on.
And every single time I was just fixing someone's lazy programming.
Ofcourse I agree that there should be a limit to optimizations, but most of the time simple fixes will reduce seconds.
> And every single time I was just fixing someone's lazy programming.
Often, the kinds of mistakes you mention are not due to laziness, but instead to ignorance. Many web developers come from a graphic design or old school "webmaster" background and some never really mastered programming as a skill. They're comfortable writing and/or copy-pasting small scripts using jQuery or some favorite library for minor enhancements to a page, but struggle when it comes to building a cohesive, performant, well-designed application for the front-end.
I myself was a member of this group until about 2007-2008, when I made a concerted effort to upgrade my programming skills. I did intensive self-study of algorithms, data structures, low-level programming, functional programming, SICP (most of it) and K&R C (all of it), etc.
More recently, Coursera and EdX have been a great resource for me to continue to advance for software development skills.
I made a lot of sites fast(er) in maybe 4 hours time. Yes, slow frameworks are slow so you cannot change that in 4 hours time. But most frameworks arent that slow. My work involved: rewriting a slow query used on every page, changing PNGs to JPEG and reducing the resolution, moving an event that is fired on every DOM redraw, and so on.
And every single time I was just fixing someone's lazy programming.
Ofcourse I agree that there should be a limit to optimizations, but most of the time simple fixes will reduce seconds.