

Premature Optimization and the Birth of Nginx Module Development - mattyb
http://evanmiller.org/premature-optimization-and-nginx-module-development.html

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Smerity
I always wondered why an Nginx module that was about generating a circle had
such prominence on the Nginx website and now I can say I understand =]

Although this was premature optimization I still find it a beautiful hack. The
author was still not content with the C solution of actually generating the
GIF each time (which took 30ms, actually a long time for servers) and instead
reframed the problem at a deeper level and created a beautiful little hack
that just modified the palette table.

~~~
jarin
If you like that, you should look into old-school color cycling/palette
shifting techniques used in the 8-bit era.

Someone did it with HTML5 too:

[http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5)

Demo:

<http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0>

~~~
StavrosK
I've seen that before, but I'm still amazed at how beautiful it is. I can't
fathom how simple palette cycling can produce these effects, even when I'm
looking at the palette.

