Within the last couple years I have gotten more into design methodology, planning methodology and the evaluation of code quality verses quantity. I read several blogs that attempt to broach this subject: lesscode.org and 37signals‘ blog. They’ve had a disagreement recently, which is fine, its none of my business… I don’t care. However, Jason’s post that I read about 2 minutes ago reminded me of something: Steve Wozniac. Steve was the keynote speaker at the Gnomedex several years back and that speech was presented as an MP3 on IT Conversations. What really grabbed me about his talk was not just the funny stories, which were sometimes hilarious, but also the that he took the limitations of his components to be a challenge of their optimization. If I can only have X then how can I make X as fast as possible? This is the mindset that all hardware designers, coders and product developers should have (unless the device is SUPPOSED to be slow 🙂 ).
Learn how to write already faster code. For example read books on speed optimization so that when you code you automatically use the loop type that is quickest for the language in your scenario (that means you need to know what type of loop is fastest in what scenario). I know in PHP that various appending operators for text strings are faster (‘,’ is faster than ‘.’), using single quotes instead of double quotes makes the page get processed faster because double quotes are always parsed for PHP variables. I recommend that you learn your language, know why C++ uses character arrays instead of string objects on a more basic level. In fact, learn why Java does that as well… if you’re using Java. But learn it and know it, you’ll be glad you did, and so will your employer if you have one. And if you’re self employed… this should be old news for you.
