Memories Cached

The problem of attaching your ego to Google Analytics and other metrics is that at any moment or month the opaque workings of tech giants can flip on you and ruin your mood.

Maybe my Android phone is always listening to me, because it feels like every time I warn someone that building successful websites is completely dependent on Google algorithms, those algorithms then result in bad news.

After solid and then incredible growth last year, autumn has seen falling visitors, revenue and search rankings for a site that I've only been enhancing.

Maybe it's because I disabled the obnoxious auto ads that Google is punishing me.

The only other issue I can see is that my LCP timing for mobile is averaging 5 seconds.

To try and address the latter, I spent the weekend optimising the front end and back end to try and increase the speeds. I didn't learn a lot about React, because I got AI to refactor that with some lazy and suspense commands.

Memcached is cool, because it's triggered by a visit to a resource, and then that resource stays in memory for a little while, making it faster and easier to recall again.

It made me realise that a lot of my memories of life are about things I journaled about, or took a photo of, and are therefore cached. Unlike MySQL, human memories deteriorate over time and you can't export them, so using forms of cache is super helpful for tethering your existence to reality like a trail of breadcrumbs through space time.

Here's some things I want to cache from this exercise:

• Turning on compression in CPanel really helped the speed and download size
  
• Pre-Caching a bunch of stuff by making fetch requests to the controller instead of just loading the content through a SQL query is inefficient, but saved me a lot of development time.
  
• I probably should have learnt a server-side rendered framework first instead of using React with a PHP back end. Oh well.
  
• After doing all the work on the weekend, I realised on Tuesday that I could actually radically improve performance by reducing a chain of dependent API calls and instead do a location lookup inside the event look up. Fuck me for trying to implement a RESTful architecture, right Google?
  
• I do so much IT during my work times, and yet I spent a sunny autumn Sunday implementing memcached. However, the same amount of time could have been used to watch a couple of football games and a movie. I didn't do that, I rarely do that anymore. I just enjoy solving problems with technology. And I really want to beat Google at their ruin-my-mood challenge.
  
• Breath of the Wild doesn't hold your hand much. Either that or I'm missing some tutorial somewhere. So when I did take a short break and played it, I had an amazing ah-hah moment when I realised that I could knock down trees with bombs and use the fallen trunk to cross a chasm and reach a shrine. As gaming goes, it was a really rewarding experience and much better than the adrenaline filled checklist ticking exercise that AoE2 build order into resign was back when that was my game of choice. It also has dynamic time of day and when I knocked the tree down it was sunset and so quite a picturesque moment of triumph. I am caching that memory for sure.