I went to a top ten school. I had one semester of circuit design, one one of EE, and a couple of computer architecture that went over the MIPs and writing assem

I went to a top ten school. I had one semester of circuit design, one one of EE, and a couple of computer architecture that went over the MIPs and writing assembly. I think there was some sort of transition of curriculum going on with the introductory classes though because the difficulty from one homework assignment to the next that first year of CS 1XX classes was pretty choppy. A friend and I made a game of one-upsmanship of adding our own constraints to the easier assignments to make them more interesting. Like taking larger inputs than the requirements and counting execution time. When I left school my first job the application was glacially slow, and I learned half of what I know about optimization in a short stint there through trial and error. It was a couple jobs in before I ever got pushback and had to learn the human factors element. But it (the optimization balanced against readability, robustness, extensibility) was a way I have always made pedestrian work more interesting. There are whole classes of code smells that also contain performance penalties, and at the peak of my restlessness I needed those to keep my sanity without irritating coworkers. I’m just cleaning up this messy code, nothing to see here. Reading release notes for other tools bragging on their improvements. Dev tools and frameworks are more forthcoming about how and what than consumer apps, but there are standouts from time to time. I read a ton of SIGPLAN proceedings during that era. Fortune favors the prepared mind and you look a lot smarter when you’re confronting a problem or opportunity with a primed pump rather than coming in cold (being friendly with other disciplines in your company also helps there).