Performance beyond improv

In the world of software development or technology in general, performance often gets overlooked or is looked at late. Daniel Drozdzewski examines the philosophical aspects and benefits of keeping performance at the forefront of your mind.

The history of humankind can be looked at through many lenses, including performance. But let’s not limit ourselves only to Gbps, GHz, IOPS, or CPUs’ instructions per cycle. Look wider than digital—even wider than technology—with Daniel Drozdzewski. It was the increased capacity of our brains together with improved vocal abilities that helped create languages and kick-started our species. Epochs and eras are punctuated by increased ability to feed humankind, our ever-improving tools to harness the energy, our increasing ability to make better tools, allowing us to have more time to think and imagine further improvements. This accelerating virtuous cycle continued and made us undisputed champions of the world in all domains imaginable (sometimes to our detriment). As you can see, merely scratching the surface shows that performance is an interesting angle to look at things around us in general. Having appreciated the wider and all-encompassing benefits of performance, let’s bring the topic back to software delivery. Let’s look at what tools are available, what techniques can be applied, and how little it takes for a team to become mature and confident about performance. You’ll see other (often fuzzier and less tangible) benefits of increased performance on a team and the product.