As professionals working in technology, we are often thinking about trade offs. One of the common trade offs we need to make is one between Latency an

Latency versus Throughput

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2021-05-23 20:30:05

As professionals working in technology, we are often thinking about trade offs. One of the common trade offs we need to make is one between Latency and Throughput. In simple terms, optimizing for latency means that you are able to get some user value out the door faster. Optimizing for throughput means that you are likely going to take longer, but you will delivery more feature to the user. Kent Beck does a great job explaining this in his recent blogpost. I urge you to read this blogpost, just takes 4 minutes.

The key 🔑 for our career growth, is to be able to identify, for any given task, whether you need to optimize for latency or you need to optimize for throughput. In general the agile methodology teaches us to ship something sooner, because the real world (for which we build software) is in a constant state of flux. If we take too long (high latency) to ship something we are going to the run the risk of the customers needs changing and no longer requiring what we built.