
Check out Wave, a new social media app for first years - adam_lam
http://wavechat.tech
======
onion2k
This is exactly the sort of site HN readers complain about whenever there's a
thread about frontend dev. 24MB over the network and 22.7s before the page is
interactive from a cold cache start. Even with the page cached it takes 3s to
start. All for a 3-screens-tall page with a few light animations. There's been
literally no attempt to optimize some of the assets. For example,
[https://wavechat.tech/assets/img/matthew.JPG](https://wavechat.tech/assets/img/matthew.JPG)
is a 2732x2733 JPG that's displayed at 384x384 resolution. Putting it through
[https://squoosh.app/](https://squoosh.app/) and optimizing it for the right
size and better JPEG encoding reduced the size by _97%_. That website should
be 200Kb and displaying in 500ms _at most._

Obviously this is a criticism of the website rather than the application, but
I don't even want to try it if the marketing site is that poor.

~~~
adam_lam
thanks for the feedback we will work on that

~~~
adam_lam
other than optimizing assets are there other ways to speed up the
responsiveness of the site?

~~~
onion2k
" _You can never make a computer programme run faster. You can only make it do
less._ " Anon

------
adam_lam
Online classes suck, especially since it’s hard to meet new people and make
new friends. We’re fellow UW 2025 students and we just launched Wave, a
platform that connects incoming first-years from the same school, based on
program and interests, through one-on-one chats! We’re in the beta phase,
exclusively for UWaterloo students. If you want to meet some students in your
program or with common interests, check out
[https://wavechat.tech](https://wavechat.tech)

