Author here. This was almost worth a mention in the article. Every once in a while I'd have a friend take a look at a piece of my algorithm and they'd suggest s

Author here. This was almost worth a mention in the article. Every once in a while I'd have a friend take a look at a piece of my algorithm and they'd suggest swapping out a sort() function for a priority queue etc. (without looking at the performance data) and find no change or sometimes even a slightly worse result! This is why having performance data is so critical, the performance of a complex algorithm can be counter-intuitive and most performance "gotchas" are just straight up mistakes or recalculations rather than fundamental algorithm issues (remember the GTA5 bug that caused the loading screen to take an extra 5 seconds, and was simple enough for a random dev to patch? that is the most common type of performance issue in development!)