🧩 Background

While working on a feature that involved loading our company’s internal Employee Directory, I noticed something frustrating:
every refresh took about 10 seconds — and that was on a fast connection.

During debugging, I realized it wasn’t just my local machine struggling.
The API was returning roughly 5 MB of data per request, and every load pulled every single employee record with redundant nested information.

For users accessing the system from the province, where connectivity can be limited and data costs are higher, this wasn’t just inconvenient — it was unfairly inaccessible.