2026-06-08 00:22

Some advice I gave someone on Discord today:

A common beginner mistake is to optimize by vibes just because some experts said “doing X is more efficient than Y”, “avoid doing Z”, etc. Further, different applications can have drastically different performance characteristics and requirements. One can easily micro-optimize for nanoseconds when the program wastes seconds elsewhere. Writing code with performance in mind is good. But don’t think too hard or perform micro-optimization until

• you identified some performance problems
• you measured that your optimization meaningfully improves performance

by profiling and benchmarking