attitude

3 Commandments of Performance Optimization

In my experience, most programmer attitudes on speed fall into one of these categories:

laissez-faire

Programmers with this mindset think about performance on occasion, but it’s not a big focus. Occasionally they’re forced to tackle problems because a particular design is too slow, a customer is unhappy, or new scaling requirements materialize. In such cases, they experiment until behavior improves, and then go back to the work they really care about.

passionate

Programmers with this mindset have a hard time not thinking about performance. Every design they do reflects elaborate consideration of how to minimize footprint and/or how to complete a task in the shortest possible time. (Note that those two priorities often conflict.) Programmers who are passionate about performance often feel like their laissez-faire counterparts are derelict in their duty.

I don’t think either of these extremes is healthy in all cases. I have seen programmers who chronically think about performance too late,  creating large refactoring burdens and sabotaging their company’s success. Sometimes when you go from “make it work” to “make it fast” you find that all your original work is a waste, because a totally different design (even different tests, conceivably) is the only way forward; I wrote about this in “A Quibble with Martin’s ‘Optimize Later’ Notion“.

On the other hand, it is possible to be too passionate about performance; optimizing the performance of the dev team (by decreasing coding and testing time) is often a better business choice than optimizing execution speed in ways that make code more complex and harder to verify. I have encountered performance zealots disqualifying a perfectly good design on the grounds that it’s not performant enough in a use case that only 2 customers on the entire planet would ever care about. Not smart. As I’ve said many times, good code is balanced.

ThrustSSC — the first car to break the sound barrier. Sometimes speed is the ultimate criterion. However, most money is made on cars with more modest performance requirements. Photo credit: cmglee (Wikimedia Commons)

Let’s assume you buy my criticism of the extremes, and you’re willing to apply the “it depends” doctrine. Continue reading →

Tech Debt, Leverage, and Grandma’s Envelope

In my previous posts about tech debt, I focused on how we can help organizations remember their debts, and on understanding how tech debts are funded and paid back.

Photo credit: Friends of the Earth International (Flickr)

Photo credit: Friends of the Earth International (Flickr)

These topics hit a raw nerve with coders and testers. Those in the trenches often feel very keenly the cost of doing things in a messy way, and it’s common for them to worry that others don’t “get it.”

They’re not wrong to worry.

However, today I’d like to put on my executive hat and discuss tech debt from a perspective that code jockeys sometimes miss, because blindness is not just an executive disease.

Debt as Leverage

When you hear the word “leverage” in business circles, people are talking about debt: a “highly-leveraged” firm is one financing large portions of its strategy through debt; “leveraged buyouts” are transactions where the buyers borrow vast sums of money from a risk-taking lender to take a company private.

Technogeeks (like me): business people are not dumb. Why did they settle on this metaphor of debt as leverage?

The answer is that debt can allow a company to concentrate enough capital in a short enough timeframe to make high-impact strategic moves that would otherwise be impossible. It’s an enabler and multiplier.

Another take on leverage. Image credit: xkcd.

Debt is a fundamental machine in the business toolkit, just as levers are a fundamental machine for mechanical engineers. Almost all businesses use debt to some extent. If a CEO can borrow capital at 9% and produce 12% ROI with it, and Continue reading →