Yesterday my new wifi-n router arrived, along with two adapters. Our old Netgear wireless-g kept getting hung up and needed about 3 resets a day.
Worse than that, though, was the speed and throughput. When you’re developing web apps, latency during testing equates to unnecessary time invested. If you sit for a second instead of 5/100 of a second, well that adds up to a lot of unproductive time.
But we humans tend not to notice what we don’t measure until it’s a real problem. We treat symptoms instead of root causes. I’m human, and treated the symptoms by moving the router closer to my studio, daisy chaining other weak routers, etc.
For just over $100, I got two good adapters and a new router, the Linksys e2000. My wife noticed the difference right away, even without the new adapter. Both of us are feeling like we just left dial-up.
I hate spending money on gear anymore. But this was a long-needed change, and I should have been more strategic a long time ago. With Jawaya, I made a strategic though somewhat painful decision to switch from .Net to Ruby on Rails and go to a hosted platform on Heroku, because performance and speed of dev are so important to us. We feel pretty good about our ability to scale.
I’ll talk more about platform in a month or so. For today, I’m blazing through code and regret not having made the simple move of changing routers months ago. Like most regrets, I’m sending it to the wind with a smile and getting back to Jawaya 🙂