In my book, some people are taking the quote "Premature optimization is bad" too far. To me, there is a difference between optimization of some kind, and not wr

In my book, some people are taking the quote "Premature optimization is bad" too far. To me, there is a difference between optimization of some kind, and not writing dumb code. After some experience, bulk loading data in a batch job, avoiding high complexities if you can, trusting your frameworks is not part of smart optimizations - that's just writing proper code. Optimization in todays world starts when you're looking at reducing communication volume, lock contention, utilizing your persistence better, replacing locks with atomic operations, ... Those things shouldn't be done on a whim without measurements, because they will make code a lot harder for non-obvious reasons.