For any of you that have never used an unclassified DoD network: internet traffic is SLOW. This largely stems from the fact that there are many layers of proxies in between you and your content, all designed to protect you from things like..."computer information" (an actual category that caused something to be blocked for me recently). In order to counteract the slowness of multiple layers of inspection and proxies, not to mention the fact that our fiber lines are actually just squirrels that carry laser pointers with packets inside back and forth, we heavily, heavily cache content through a CDN. This actually works pretty well, because when everyone tries to get to CNN at lunch, it takes a few seconds to load the first time, but everyone else gets it pretty fast.

It leads to some really wild architectural decisions, though. Like a website that is a Vue app with a single component, that has a single prop. That prop is loaded through a <script> tag, which consists almost entirely of a 44,625-line JSON array that's just baked in to the HTML page. Every single round trip through the proxies takes an eternity (with a high failure rate), so the user experience is actually improved by just embedding the entirety of your database straight into the HTML.

Some might look down on this as inelegant. Those folks have never seen a modern website when the css failed to make it through the proxy, and every <div> gets splashed onto the screen in arbitrary order and without styling.