I’d argue that in many cases a 100x optimization is much easier than a 10% speedup. Very often the 100x speedup isn’t because you’re now doing something particu

I’d argue that in many cases a 100x optimization is much easier than a 10% speedup. Very often the 100x speedup isn’t because you’re now doing something particularly clever, but because you were doing something stupid before. It’s very easy to do something horribly inefficient if important parts are hidden behind some abstractions. An ORM is maybe the best example of this, if you’re not careful you can easily generate queries with it that are several orders of magnitude slower than the straightforward and efficient version. Optimizing parts that are already reasonably efficient is much harder, but unless you spent a lot of time optimizing already there are likely plenty of low hanging fruit.