From what I've seen the faster solution is also usually the simplest, which makes it faster to deliver and easier to maintain. We're far away from what Knuth wa

From what I've seen the faster solution is also usually the simplest, which makes it faster to deliver and easier to maintain. We're far away from what Knuth warned about (micro-optimizing assembly). It's more at the level of high-level design, technology choice, etc. Like at my last job, we had something like 50 microservices, Kafka, rabbit, redis, varnish caching, etc. For under 1k external requests/second and some batch processes that ran for a few million accounts. If we cut out all of the architecture to "scale", you could've run the whole thing on a laptop if not a raspberry pi. And then a real server could scale that 100x. The company was looking at moving to a "cloud native" serverless architecture when I left.