[AWebOfBrown]

Everything I needed to know about Russell's performance war was answered when, whilst he was working at Google, folk started asking him why he was naming and shaming companies for poor performance when his exact critiques were swiftly applied to Google's apps (calendar, maps, gmail). I wish I could find the twitter thread from back then, but the gist of his response was that what Google was doing was incredibly complicated, far more than anything the targets of his ire were working on, and as such it was reasonable not to have fixed those issues.

He wasn't wrong in his assessment of complexity, but the fact he refused to acknowledge the business priorities were the same between Google and companies he called out, absolutely baffled me. The gist from my perspective was that companies external to his own should bend over backwards for performance, while his should not, because his personal goals were tied to improving the performance of the web. Hopefully that's an over-simplification and I've missed something, but that's what I can recall.

[swyx]

“it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.

[mattgreenrocks]

Ah yes, the classic "our problems are the hardest" perspective.

These are usually the narratives we tell ourselves to let ourselves off the hook.

[dmitriid]

Don't forget that he's also shaming everyone for complexity while his own work brings untold complexity to the web platform through dozens of Javascript-only standards around Web Components.