This month, I want to highlight an article by Evan Martin, Ninja. Evan details a build system he created with the goal of building Chrome faster. Evan walks us through why he created Ninja, how he views optimization, and several tricks he used to continue to optimize his build system as the complexity grew over time.

http://www.aosabook.org/en/posa/ninja.html

“Why care about startup speed? For a browser, a quick startup conveys a feeling of lightness, that doing something on the web is as trivial an action as opening a text file. Further, the impact of latency on your happiness and on losing your train of thought is well-studied in human-computer interaction. Latency is especially a focus of web companies like Google or Amazon, who are in a good position to measure and experiment on the effect of latency–and who have done experiments that show that delays of even milliseconds have measurable effects on how frequently people use the site or make purchases. It’s a small frustration that adds up subconsciously.”