I find that quite fascinating. I love making things perform faster. It's one of the most rewarding things to do as a programmer, and "low hanging fruit" optimisations are usually quite simple, "mindless" work, to do in a quiet period between solving hard problems. The wins are easily measured. It can take a long time to do in a complex system, but it's usually pleasant and relaxing time.
Yeah same here! Nothing like watching a 200ms timer go down to 100ms just because you swapped out some data structure or cached some variable. It's a very satisfying game to me.
I'm old enough to have been a timesharing programmer (when a 32k->64k working memory increase seemed like limitless abundance).
The company I worked for offered very expensive timesharing by the hour. Clients used an "Englishy" interpreted language to do economic forecasts, and client staff often programmed their own procedures.
My boss came to me one day to request that I speed up something a client had developed themselves, because it had become too expensive for them to run, and they were ready to bolt.
I had no desire to understand what their code did, and so treated the code mostly like a blackbox, and my job as speeding things up while leaving the transformation of inputs to particular outputs intact.
I had enough experience to know what the low hanging fruit were and went after those in the code. A day's work or so, and we got a 50-90% speed-up, enough to satisfy the client. I still don't really know what the code did. But I enjoyed the effort.
Same here. The two most interesting parts of programming to me are optimisation (mostly speed, sometimes memory though it's not needed as often) and debugging (especially when I can just reason out where the bug must be and it turns out to be correct).
I just had the pleasure of optimizing a video subsystem startup from 44 seconds to just under 2 seconds. I expect to get down to 200 ms by end of day. I love optimization.
I always start with timing it. The thing is many projects I end up in it feels like a death by a thousand cuts. Every sub function is very quick but overall together they take up tons of time. I worked one project where I took logins from 6 seconds to sub 100ms. No one cared or even noticed. Even though it was top 10 on every metric we had.
