Published on
December 5th, 2022

In my first year-ish at Pantheon I presented "Why Your Site is Slow" (a high-level overview of web performance issues) about a dozen times between conferences and webinars. The recurring theme was that websites, and their performance characteristics, reflect the people who make them. I laid out that main idea in a 2016 blog post: Fast Teams Make Fast Websites.

As a sonnet:

Conway’s law rules everything around me:
Organizations designing systems
Replicate their communication tree.
Old insights hold true in modern prisms.

If you divide front-end developers
From back-end devs, the code will separate.
Even in monoliths, a tear occurs.
For some, that’s a good way to operate.

Extend the metaphor to your meetings.
Do you serve your client clear, complete plans?
Messy scripts can interrupt proceedings.
Your patterns persist to the operands.

Conway says our work reflects us despite
Intentions. That’s why fast teams make fast sites.