alt Hacker NewsAwesome post, illuminating metaphor, +1.
Tangent: why do so many people (even smart articulate ones like you) in our field (which involves precision with syntax and grammar) get apostrophes wrong?
"It's [IT IS] like its [ITS/HIS/HER/MY/YOUR/THEIR] own ecosystem..."
I anticipate downvotes for picking nits (let alone mentioning karma points), but FTR my intent is to help non-native English speakers (and mostly-literate English language-natives). Getting this "it's : its" distinction wrong is increasingly common and sometimes leads to signal loss.
Yesco, rereading your comment makes me slightly ashamed of this apostrophe rant, I hope others comment on the substance here. / end tangent
As someone who spent years doing web performance optimization for a living, your observations resonate. Beyond obvious low-hanging fruit, latency gains are rarely simple to achieve in practice; tradeoffs abound.
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Ha yeah it reads a bit silly, to be honest I lazily typed my original post on my phone while sitting on a hammock outside, I didn't really review it much before posting. Autocorrect can make it challenging for me to do apostrophes correctly since it often overassumes my intent.
To your tangent. When I was taught its vs it's, I was never given the association to his/hers/etc. It was just arbitrary and something you just had to memorize. Reading your post I am shocked I never made the connection earlier but it was just never knowledge I was provided with to work from.