Effective Optimization

I'll start with a simple premise: spend more time optimizing repeated
activities to get the biggest bang for you buck.

For example, if you wash dishes every day, but only mow the lawn once
a month, you will do better to spend some time improving your dish
washing skills, rather than spend that same time improving your lawn
mowing skills.

Similarly, if you are coding and you run across the need for a loop,
you should expend your effort optimizing the loop (especially if it
undergoes many iterations) than optimizing code that only executes
once.

The reasoning behind this rationale is simple. If you shave a second
off of a task that is executed once, you have saved a second. But, if
you shave a second off of an operation that occurs 3600 times, you
have saved an hour.

So, as a programmer, it seems natural to spend some time up-front
learning your tools (you do that once), in order to save time using
your tools (you do that lots).

I would gladly spend an hour learning a new time-saving feature of my
editor (namely Vim), if I will have the opportunity to use that
feature to save a second, ten million times before I die. (Ten million
seconds is well over a year's worth of 40-hour work weeks.) That
would be a really good use of an hour. Shoot, you could justify that
even if it took a week to learn that feature.

To sum up, I might say that an effective programmer should spend time
learning to:

1. Type rapidly,
2. Edit text quickly,
3. Know the languages that he/she uses well, and
4. Be able to quickly and effectively use his/her entire tool chain.

After all, just a few well-targeted optimizations in the form of the
basic programmer skills can mean years and years of savings over the
course of your career.