4 articles in this topic
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" is the most-quoted line in programming. It's true. But it's been twisted into an excuse to ignore performance entirely — and that's its own kind of evil.
Elite athletes don't 'try to focus.' They run a pre-performance ritual that flips a switch. I stole it for my desk work, and my focus stopped being a coin flip.
I used to optimize code that ran twice a year. Letting go of premature performance work made me a faster, happier engineer.
Our build took nine minutes and everyone had accepted it. One afternoon of profiling found the real bottleneck — and it wasn't where anyone guessed.
