3 ms·

It's not worth optimising if you don't have a problem. Focus your effort. If this code runs once per week at midnight, needs to finish by 5am, and currently it

It's not worth optimising if you don't have a problem. Focus your effort. If this code runs once per week at midnight, needs to finish by 5am, and currently it takes 18 minutes, the fact it could take 40 seconds isn't actually important and so spending meaningful engineering effort to go from 18 minutes to 40 seconds is a waste. On the other hand, if the code runs on every toaster when it's started and ideally would finish before the toast pops up, but currently takes 4 minutes, then even getting it down to 2.5 minutes will make more customers happy [also, why the fuck are we running software in the toaster? But that's beside the point] and might well be worth doing. The classic UX examples given are much closer to the latter category. When I type fast the symbols ought to appear immediately for example, if you can't do that then you have a performance problem and optimisation is appropriate. But so much of what software engineers do all day isn't in that space and doesn't need to prioritise performance so optimisation shouldn't be a priority. In particular Fast but Wrong is just Wrong. https://x.com/magdraws/status/1551612747569299458 https://x.com/magdraws/status/1551612747569299458

mikrl 8mo ago
>so much of what software engineers do all day isn't in that space Seems to me that critical infra that supports a lot of modern computing is in that space though. If you want to develop that depth of knowledge you need to go into HPC/scientific, trading or accelerator hardware. I didn’t get into this sometimes crazy industry to NOT learn stuff and push the limits of my computer. I’m glad I know about those applications now, but I wonder how much of a disservice we did to the industry by just focusing on frameworks and abstraction especially now that you can just sling a lot of that out with a prompt…
hinkley 8mo ago
In the era of kubernetes and edge servers and everything running on battery power, that distinction between need and want becomes much fuzzier because of course we can bin pack the more efficient one better or preserve another five minutes of standby time even if the wall clock behavior is moot. And I’d also argue that if you wait to use a skill only until the need is dire then you will be both 1) shit at doing it and fail to achieve your goal well and 2) won’t have spent enough time on the cost/benefit analysis to know when things have changed over from want to need. Like the blind people I allude to in my top level.

mikrl 8mo ago

>so much of what software engineers do all day isn't in that space Seems to me that critical infra that supports a lot of modern computing is in that space though. If you want to develop that depth of knowledge you need to go into HPC/scientific, trading or accelerator hardware. I didn’t get into this sometimes crazy industry to NOT learn stuff and push the limits of my computer. I’m glad I know about those applications now, but I wonder how much of a disservice we did to the industry by just focusing on frameworks and abstraction especially now that you can just sling a lot of that out with a prompt…

hinkley 8mo ago

In the era of kubernetes and edge servers and everything running on battery power, that distinction between need and want becomes much fuzzier because of course we can bin pack the more efficient one better or preserve another five minutes of standby time even if the wall clock behavior is moot. And I’d also argue that if you wait to use a skill only until the need is dire then you will be both 1) shit at doing it and fail to achieve your goal well and 2) won’t have spent enough time on the cost/benefit analysis to know when things have changed over from want to need. Like the blind people I allude to in my top level.