Does a person help my team deliver software to stakeholders? If they stomp their feet and demand that we spend a week reducing the program’s memory

Write Code That Delivers Value to Clients

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-27 09:00:04

Does a person help my team deliver software to stakeholders? If they stomp their feet and demand that we spend a week reducing the program’s memory footprint by 10% when the stakeholders don’t care, then the answer is “no”. - Online comment

Before I went down the weird-ass software road I'm walking now, I was a backend dev for eSpark Learning. Core rails app, infrastructure, stuff like that. I did some really smart things, some really stupid things, and learned I'm not the best team player. I'm still good friends with several people who work there. One project I worked on has been on my mind this week. I'm working entirely off memory here and tweaked some things for the sake of the narrative, so this isn't 100% accurate.

2016, several months before the stuff that would lead me to formal methods, I forget what I was officially working on at the time. I had an urgent assignment, though: our data scientists' queries were timing out, I was supposed to look into that. I booted into our "data warehouse" (An AWS server running Postgres), made a couple tweaks, and asked someone to try a query again.

The average query took a day to run. Nobody saw anything wrong with that; that was just how it always was. But this deeply bothered me. We only had a couple terabytes of data, it shouldn't take that long? I decided to look into it, seeing if I could make it take less time.

Leave a Comment