Quotes About Optimization

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. —Alfred North Whitehead

When you see commented-out code, delete it!

I like my code to be elegant and efficient. The logic should be straightforward to make it hard for bugs to hide, the dependencies minimal to ease maintenance, error handling complete according to an articulated strategy, and performance close to optimal so as not to tempt people to make the code messy with unprincipled optimizations. Clean code does one thing well. -Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++ and author of The C++ Programming Language

A good manager drives a project to be good enough, fast enough, cheap enough, and done as much as necessary. A good manager manages the coefficients on these attributes rather than demanding that all those coefficients are 100%. It is this kind of management that Agile strives to enable.

1. "First make it work." You are out of business if it doesn't work. 2. "Then make it right." Refactor the code so that you and others can understand it and evolve it as needs change or are better understood. 3. "Then make it fast." Refactor the code for "needed" performance.

The fact that we did not have a database running for 18 months of development meant that, for 18 months, we did not have schema issues, query issues, database server issues, password issues, connection time issues, and all the other nasty issues that raise their ugly heads when you fire up a database. It also meant that all our tests ran fast, because there was no database to slow them down.

The goal of software architecture is to minimize the human resources required to build and maintain the required system.

In general, it is harmful to depend on modules that contain more than you need. This is obviously true for source code dependencies that can force unnecessary recompilation and redeployment—but it is also true at a much higher, architectural level.

Recall that the goal of an architect is to minimize the human resources required to build and maintain the required system.

Don't Use a Comment When You Can Use a Function or a Variable

Prerender.io Prerender.io will grab the updated values and store them in your page snapshots so they are optimized for SEO purposes. This allows you to conveniently update the meta elements for each individual page in your AngularJS single page application and store them correctly in your Prerender page snapshots. You can preview the prerender output by using the _escaped_fragment_= parameter as described in the prerender.io documentation.

One of the saddest sights to me has always been a human at a keyboard doing something by hand that could be automated. It's sad but hilarious.

The motto of science is not just Pauca but rather Plurima ex paucissimis - the most out of the least.

There is a story about Henry Ford that dramatizes the "just enough" philosophy nicely: Ford used to send his people out to scour the scrap heaps of America looking for old Ford engines. Dragging them back to Detroit, they would look for the parts that hadn't worn out and then downgrade the specifications to save money.

Websites are kind of useless. There's so much great web content and design out there, but the ways in which they are being experienced are not being maximized.

A story tells of Henry Ford's buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find the weak parts and make them stronger. Nope. Ford explained that he wanted to find the parts that were still in good shape. The company could save money if they redesigned these parts to fail at the same time as the others.

We will discover that reducing batch size is usually the single most cost-effective way to reduce queues.

Our primary goal in product development is to make good economic choices. All proxy objectives, such as innovation, waste reduction, design for manufacturing, etc., should be viewed as secondary. They are a means to influence overall economic outcomes, never an end in themselves. In

Finding something may be satisfactory, but not finding everything is suboptimal. (Dr. Pat Croskerry)

With marketing, with customer acquisition, with accounting, I first look and say, "Hey, what's taking people's time? What can we automate?" If I can't automate it, do I really need it to be done? If I do need it to be done, all right, then we'll open a req.

Peter Drucker quotes a definition of an entrepreneur as someone who moves resources from areas of lower productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.

A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.

The key idea is that we construct our production flow by starting with the longest (or most difficult, or most sensitive, or most expensive) step and work our way back.