
Big-O: how code slows as data grows - ingve
https://nedbatchelder.com/text/slowsgrows.html
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freedomben
I have a CS degree, and while I feel it has been quite helpful, I by no means
think less of those without one or that it makes me a better dev than someone
else. In fact, most of the best developers I've worked with have not had a CS
degree. My running theory is that the same skills and talents that enable
somebody to learn software engineering/programming without the structure of a
degree program are the same skills and talents that make a great engineer.
Long story short, there is no reason to feel like less of a dev, programmer,
or engineer because you don't have a piece of paper.

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userbinator
Also related:
[https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/](https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/)
examples of where, due to abstraction or otherwise, a quadratic or even worse
algorithm emerges, and is not obvious from a quick glance since the multiple
nested loops are separated out from each other.

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InclinedPlane
I ran into an excellent example of this once. A build system was performing a
bunch of operations on a very large (hundreds of megs) xml file. There was a
little javascript utility that was created to perform operations on the xml
file. That script was called externally with hundreds of separate operations.
This took about half of a day. Because each time the xml document was loaded
and saved by the script took about 4 mins of overhead. I rewrote the script so
that it could do multiple operations in one pass, bringing the time for that
step back to about 4 mins total instead of 12 hours.

