I've worked on making performance improvements across all tiers, and in a variety of ways within any given tier, during the course of my career and one thing I can say with a good degree of certainty is that it gets more challenging as you get closer to your goal. Reducing a page rendering time from 3 seconds to 1 second is a whole lot easier than reducing it to 900ms, then to 800ms, and then to 50ms!

This podcast is partly in English and partly in Tamil (my native tongue). And it is not technical! It is me expressing my gratitude to the "Mozart of Madras"!

If your pages take too long to render, caching may be a solution but before you go all out and start implementing or improving it, ask yourself if there are other fundamental problems that need addressing first (which led to the issues in the first place).

Caching is a broad topic (what isn't?). In this podcast, I've only tried to scratch the surface. How do you determine what to cache? And once you do, how do you go about it?

When building UI screens (on mobile apps) or pages (on web apps), you want to focus your energies on your specific business problems. What you don't want to do is spend time reinventing the wheel.

Whether you are designing a NoSQL Database or a traditional RDBMS Database, one way to optimize to ensure faster retrieval is to denormalize but that's not the best (or even the first) solution. You want to try out a few other things before resorting to denormalization.

(Part 2) Separation of concerns is important to keep your native mobile app modular and becomes especially important when your app integrates with 100s of APIs. You want to ensure that your app is resilient to changes to the API Spec.