Web App Development and Caching

Any web developer who works with external services or databases (that’s probably almost every web developer) has probably run into performance problems. The problem is that running code by itself is pretty fast. Databases and external services / APIs are very slow. Waiting on an external API to load is basically the computer equivalent of waiting for a brontosaurus to walk a kilometer.

As web developers, we have a very powerful tool called caching. It’s being used in your computer reading this sentence every microsecond, with various levels of caching happening between the CPU, memory, and hard drive (or SSD). The act of caching is saving the result of a slow operation in a easily accessible space. In this case, we will be talking about caching database results and API results.

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