Optimize Last Because it May
Not be as Slow as You Think
We needed to add some new
functionality to the VCAPS project at Ford. Based on some other code in the system that ran 8 hours this new section
would run in no less than 16 hours even after we squeezed ever little bit of performance out of it. We added the
new functionality as simply as possible. We ignored concerns of speed in favor of concerns of code clarity and
maintainability. Make it run, make it right, make it fast. When we had finished the
code we fired it up on a Friday afternoon in anticipation of several days of run time since we had not done any
optimizing. We were shocked when it came back in 1 hour. By keeping our design simple and understandable we had
managed to avoid several "penny wise, pound foolish" types of optimization that other sections of code
had fallen prey to. At this point we could have
considered optimization, but because it was so much faster than any other portion of the system we didn't need
to do any optimization at all.
We needed to add some new
functionality to the VCAPS project at Ford. Based on some other code in the system that ran 8 hours this new section
would run in no less than 16 hours even after we squeezed ever little bit of performance out of it. We added the
new functionality as simply as possible. We ignored concerns of speed in favor of concerns of code clarity and
maintainability. Make it run, make it right, make it fast.
