Thursday, October 5, 2017

In Pursuit of Efficiency

The first few years of your career you learn a huge amount. Make the best out of it, and develop an attitude to observe and learn from your own experiences. After every task, take a moment. Look back at what you did. How you did it. Feel good about it. And importantly, think how could you could have done it better and faster.

This look-back ends up becoming very critical, and helps you evolve much faster with each iteration. And act on, what you think, could have been improved upon.

Typical things you should think of:

  • Can I optimise the time spent switching windows
  • Could I save the build time by running multiple threads 
  • Could I overlap this activity with that
  • If a tool keeps taking most of my time, I should be a power-user of that tool
  • I got these code review comments, what was the rationale behind points 2 and 5? Search or ask the reviewer
  • Could I have done this faster if I had approached the problem differently?
  • Are there any recurring patterns across the tasks that I have done, and the deductions I have drawn so far?


What is important is having that perspective, almost like zooming out of your body and looking at yourself, trying to identify where could you improve your efficiency.

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