Because of the age old warning about premature optimization, a lot of software that runs critical parts of the internet infrastructure is dreadfully slow. You c

Because of the age old warning about premature optimization, a lot of software that runs critical parts of the internet infrastructure is dreadfully slow. You could pick something that is deployed on millions of servers, speed it up 20%, and the win would be significant. An example is the progress bar used in `npm` during install operations. Someone discovered that it was extremely wasteful of resources. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974929 Little things like that add up. You could do even more by focusing on optimizing overall resource usage rather than just wall clock time. Perhaps even write software to automatically optimize others' software. You want to find a community that is open to change and optimization, though - some maintainers are too busy or are afraid of change.