Remixing a Symfony

In late 2020, I ran a Lighthouse test on a simple content page on Harvie, our farm management platform and Symfony app, and received a performance score of 31/100. The JavaScript bundle, the API requests, the database lookups, even with minimal UI to render, had a baseline score in the thirties! Along with customer feedback, this helped to catalyze a renewed commitment to performance at Harvie. Through numerous discussions, we walked through each step of page load, from networking to rendering, and identified where we could improve. After a year of rewrites and upgrades, our remaining detriment to overall performance was our frontend. We had been converting our Symfony twig templates into React SPA components and fell into the common problem of creating “request waterfalls”, while our user had to stare at a loading screen. We needed a change, and for us, that was Remix. In this talk, I’ll walk you through our team’s journey with performance and how Remix has become a natural progression of that.