My 5c regarding performance.
For non-trivial use cases, no wonder it would take non-trivial skills to make them right. For docs that are more like apps, having software engineering skills and thinking would be very helpful.
E.g. just a recent example of optimizing an “endlessly recalculating” doc:
And just a few days ago I optimized a very complex calculator I built for another client: I managed to reduce time required to add a set of rows from ~30 minutes down to ~3 minutes.
In both cases I just analyzed heavy formulas / unnecessary recalculations, and thought of how to bypass those. E.g., in the 30 min → 3 min case I streamlined the dependency flow (i.e. so that table B depends on table A, but nothing from table A depends on table B) and replaced a fair share of “live formulas” with inputs that could be populated just once with a button. FYI this was a table where rows were dependent on other rows from the same table (think recreating Excel cells where each cell is a Coda row), so adding a row would’ve triggered recalculations over the whole table.
This reply would’ve been a shameless plug because I’m doing Coda consulting for a living and optimizing perf is just one of the things that puts food on my table. But I’m insanely overworked already, so not a shameless plug this time 