Good performance is not just big O - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)
jmmv.dev
Having a fast and responsive app is orthogonal to “knowing your big Os”. Unfortunately, most tech companies over-emphasize algorithms in interviews and downplay systems knowledge, and I believe that’s one reason behind sluggish apps and bloated systems. I’ve seen this play out repeatedly. Interviewers ask a LeetCode-style coding question, which is then followed by the ritual of discussing time and memory complexity. Candidates ace the answers. But then… their “real” code suffers from subtle yet impactful performance problems. Focusing on big O complexity rarely matters in most apps. Sure, it’s important to think about your algorithmic choices, but there are so many more details to worry about that have a direct impact on app performance and responsiveness. Let’s look at a bunch of them!

Having a fast and responsive app is orthogonal to “knowing your big Os”. Unfortunately, most tech companies over-emphasize algorithms in interviews and downplay systems knowledge, and I believe that’s one reason behind sluggish apps and bloated systems.

I’ve seen this play out repeatedly. Interviewers ask a LeetCode-style coding question, which is then followed by the ritual of discussing time and memory complexity. Candidates ace the answers. But then… their “real” code suffers from subtle yet impactful performance problems.

  • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
    31·
    10 months ago

    Its when you find the clitoris for the first time.

    Joking aside, it’s a description of the runtime of a thing for a size of a data set. Its expressed as a function. So for example an exponential function would get longer and longer as your data set size grows, linear time has a basically proportional operating time compared to the size of the data set, and log(n) would see runtime increase very little as data set size increases.