kai_mactane

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Reload page in style: light

I’m at a one-week contract this week, and the client uses only Macs. So I’m using an unfamiliar Mac keyboard — the kind with the transparent plastic casing, and the really stiff keys (by my standards, anyway).

I am starting to get used to the propeller key already, and getting sort of used to using Meta-K instead of my usual Meta-E to access the search bar/field in Firefox. But one nice thing…

Because of the weird keyboard, I’m hoping that I can avoid transferring these habits back to my normal, PC-keyboard typing. Maybe I’ll be able to turn this drawback into a minor advantage. (Which would be nice, because reaching for the propeller key on my home computer would be seriously annoying to me.)

Originally published at Coyote Tracks. You can comment here or there.

I don’t want to optimize this code prematurely. And “while you’re still writing it” is probably premature. On the other hand, totally ignoring algorithmic complexity is a sure route to a Shlemiel the Painter’s algorithm.

Do I really want to just write the whole thing, and then start profiling it to see where the hot spots are, and then possibly have to re-design the whole thing? That seems like the complete opposite of “work smarter, not harder”. Then again, it doesn’t matter if you write an O(n²) or even O(n!) algorithm if n is always going to be small… and in this application, I expect low-to-middling n values.

Of course, even if n will always be small, and increasing CPU power is my friend… even if it performs fast enough to make users happy, I’ll still know there’s a problem down there in the details. That may be the deciding factor.

Originally published at Coyote Tracks. You can comment here or there.