3 ms·

Definitely makes you think about opportunity cost in terms of CS: spend time writing an efficient algorithm or just bust out the ole brute force. Surprisingly,

• mistermann 16y ago
  Most developers like to imagine they're going to have somewhere between 100 and 10,000 concurrent requests on their webserver shortly after launch, so they have to write really efficient algorithms. The reality is usually considerably less demanding. In most cases, its usually just cheaper to throw hardware at it. Of course, in some rare cases, algorithm efficiency is crucially important, but this is pretty rare. As much as everyone would like to think they are working on something in the same class as google, facebook, etc, very few projects are comparable. You're better off shipping early, and dealing with scalability when it becomes a problem.