I don't need my doctor to be thin when he's telling me I need to lose fat, though.
I host my blog with their service, I get thousands of visitors a day and it's always extremely fast. I love the simple deployment and the features they give me, and I evangelize their service to everyone.
Try it out, it's fantastic, despite the large landing page.
To be fair, 14.4MB of that is images (I don't know why some of them are that large, however). Does their offering specifically have something related to image optimization / scaling (I'm unfamiliar with Netlify)?
We do have image optimization built-in but it won't change images' size (in case you link externally - we don't want to move your cheese) or do anything lossy.
So - we have not resized and chosen optimal formats for those images and we are working on doing it right now :)
Netlify as a service doesn't really affect how you do things as a front-end developer, but we do help make sure that all those assets get to your browser as fast as can be.
But yes, we all agree that we should do a better job of making our website leaner and we do have a bunch of changes planned around that (and we're hiring!).
You mentioning this made me go and check it out myself and I got to say the page loads are very quick to the natural eye on my connection, FWIW. I would recommend other people check it out themselves as well.
I compared it to apple.com (since someone mentioned it in a lower comment) and apple.com had noticeable page loads whereas Netlify's blog didn't.
I am abroad on a slow 3G connection while nsurlsessiond is eating my bandwidth and the site was extremely slow (took more than a minute to load), while HN loads in 2~3s.
I'm sure the site is fast on a regular connection though.
Netlify is wonderful. I never thought to check if they dogfood their product, though. Sometimes, resources are allocated to new features and site redesign/restructuring work gets pushed to the back burner.
They are supposed to be targeted at static high performance blogs.
Yet their own blog is 15MB in size and over 100 different http requests.
See the YSlow report for their blog site below.
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.netlify.com/C6fG3uTg
It receives an "F" rating.
Isn't this kind of bloated website the exact problem Netlify is suppose to solve?