Hire Performance Developers
Web and mobile apps, desktop software, and distributed cloud-based apps — all thrive on high performance. If the performance of these applications lags at any point or during any operation, the users feel irritated, but it may cause real damage to their business.
Therefore, when you consider developing cutting-edge web applications, mobile apps, desktop software products, or backend systems, you need to keep performance as the key metric in mind. Your system should be second to none when it comes to performance at all stages, components, and application modules.
High performance can be achieved if you have performance developers specially trained to look for performance bottlenecks and remove them. You need to hire performance developers with experience and skills who can deliver lightning performance to any aspect of your application ecosystems.
Why does performance lag?
Software performance can manifest in many ways and is an integral part of the overall software development process. According to studies, many performance bottlenecks result from faulty coding, an unnecessary loop, or an unoptimized algorithm, rather than external factors.
This does not happen because application developers intentionally make simple mistakes or simply lack the skills to deliver high-performance applications.
Application developers make reasonable assumptions regarding the code, algorithm, data structure, and modules. While making those assumptions, they can make a lapse in judgment and compromise software performance.
It is difficult for even QA engineers and testers to detect such issues because sometimes it is not the code itself but how the code reacts to a certain situation, event, or data set that hampers the performance.
Performance may also lag due to many external factors. Third-party APIs and libraries are closed and offer only an interface to your software therefore you cannot really know what is going on underneath.
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Why do you need Performance Developers?
As you have seen, there are many reasons why an application’s performance can be subpar, which is the reason you need to hire performance developers. Performance developers are specially trained and uniquely skilled to monitor software performance and tackle issues affecting it regularly.
Consider a flight reservation system that allows travelers to buy tickets, digitally check-in, select their seat, pay for extra baggage, opt for a meal, redeem their frequent flyer miles, and so on. Just imagine the magnitude of development effort needed so that the system becomes accessible through multiple channels:
- All major browsers on all primary desktop OS.
- All browsers on different mobile devices.
- Mobile apps for Android and iOS.
- Web service for aggregator platforms.
- Desktop terminal for registered agents.
- Running the check-in kiosks at the airport terminals.
- Dedicated apps for ground staff and flight crew.
To top it all, all of this application must be interoperable with the legacy system running the back-end of the airline company.
A large team of application developers specializing in each technology would be required to develop such an ecosystem.
The cut-throat competition does not allow delays of even a day, let alone weeks. Therefore, you cannot waste time redesigning the application. You have to get it right in the first instance.
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Technology and tools for Performance Developers
There are many tools available that performance developers can use to optimize and boost software performance, some of them are,
- Performance, load, and stress testing
Collectively called application performance testing, performance testing, load testing, and stress testing are related. Such tests focus on the overall performance of the application at different levels of user activity or load. Various metrics such as CPU utilization, CPU activity, memory usage, page faults, instruction execution time, Garbage collector utilization, etc. help chart the application performance with different users ranging from 1 to a few thousand.
- Performance Profilers
Done at a more granular level, profiling involves gaining detailed information about the performance of a specific logical operation, such as saving a record, making an online payment, or searching a customer file. Instead of complete transactions, only one aspect is studied in detail with the same metrics like CPU utilization and memory usage. But a more detailed investigation is done for query execution plans, class instances created, time taken in a method call, function call stack, and so on.
- Resource Caching
Judicious use of content delivery networks for caching static and heavily accessed resources nearer to the client can take care of the system load. Performance developers also employ edge computing practices to store data related to local users on servers closer to them.
- Asynchronous Communication
Asynchronous processing and communication notify the user that they would receive the results later, by, say an email, so they can close the session. This enhances performance and the user experience. Division of work into discrete steps independent of each other can help accomplish this.
- Maintenance
Regular maintenance of the application, including clearing of server cache, freeing up database logs, reclaiming unreferenced memory, etc., can help improve performance. The maintenance aspect must also be part of your system design and should be automated.
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Roles and responsibility of Performance Developers
A performance developer works with every member of the system development team, including analysts, developers, system, database and network admins, and testers. They must have experience in developing web applications, mobile apps, web services, and distributed desktop applications, for all industry verticals and domains.
Their main responsibility is to identify bottlenecks that can hamper the performance of the application when required and work towards removing them.
- They apply performance engineering and agile development methodologies since the inception of the development cycle.
- They should integrate performance review code within application code to allow review, monitoring, and diagnostic on a real-time basis.
- They understand that dependent components cause performance bottlenecks. Therefore, they find ways to decouple components to optimize the overall performance.
- Performance engineers find ways to alter system design from using synchronous to asynchronous communication.
- Performance developers run advanced profilers to check for granular level issues.
- They carry out conventional load testing along with comprehensive performance testing during integration on the combined codebase.
- They focus on algorithm and data structure optimization in all software modules.
- They work with database designers to ensure that the most frequent queries are optimized.
Performance developers can help resolve many issues that hamper application performance. When you hire performance developers with skills, training, and experience, you can handle all such issues beforehand and deliver a world-class application.
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Required Expertise
Requirements - Hard skills
The mandatory skills for a Performance Developer are,
- Develop and deploy mechanisms to identify system-wide bottlenecks.
- Optimize data structures, algorithms, and component interactions in code.
- Ensure the use of micro-services, APIs, asynchronous communication, and localized resource caching.
- Use CDNs to cache static files like JavaScript, CSS, and images.
- Help in database design, query optimization, performance tuning, and efficient transaction processing.
- Tune network and bandwidth to help scale the performance.
- Bundle files together to improve performance.
- Minify code and data files by removing all unnecessary characters.
- Use icon fonts instead of icon images.
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Experience
A performance developer is an application developer with experience in many areas and technologies outside of their domain. They are involved at every stage of application development from system design to deployment and maintenance.
The key areas of expertise for a Performance Developer are many, such as,
- Highly experienced in data structures and algorithms.
- Highly experienced in the use of performance, load, and stress testing tools.
- Highly experienced in the use of application profiling tools.
- Proficient in database performance tuning.
- Highly experienced in coding, code optimization, testing, and maintenance.
- Highly experienced in asynchronous processing and API-based microservices development.
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Salary Structure of Performance Developers
The average annual salary of an experienced Performance developer is in the range of USD 75,000 and USD 90,000 in the USA. The starting annual average salary for a performance developer is USD 55,000, while the highest annual salary may go up to USD 125,000 with experience.
The salary depends on the experience in improving the measurable performance benchmarks for applications. Salary also depends on their years of experience, knowledge of technology, location, and professional certifications.
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Performance Developer- Key Takeaways
- High performance is a design choice and requires a dedicated performance developer.
- A performance developer monitors and improves the performance of the applications by writing optimized code, caching data, decoupling components, and optimizing files.
- They must be proficient in algorithms, data structure, query, and component optimization.
- A performance developer must have hands-on experience in load and stress testing as well as code profiling tools.
- Performance developers need to collaborate during the complete application development lifecycle.
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Industry Expertise
When it comes to performance development and performance developers, Skuad is a leading service provider. Our team of experienced and highly skilled performance developers have command of modern tools to optimize your application’s performance.
Skuad offers world-class and exceptional client service with timely delivery of measurable results to its clients – whether they are small, medium, and large enterprises – in all industry domains.
We offer our performance development services compliant with applicable rules & regulations in your jurisdiction. Our managed services solutions and recruitment services are available on a 24x7x365 basis to global clients.
You can put to rest your search to hire performance developers and contact our experienced analysts to offer you the best possible solutions.
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